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How the US might be using AI in Iran

Are Claude and ChatGPT helping the US fight a war?

In the week leading up to President Donald Trump’s war in Iran, the Pentagon was waging a different battle: a fight with the AI company Anthropic over its flagship AI model, Claude.

That conflict came to a head on Friday, when Trump said that the federal government would immediately stop using Anthropic’s AI tools. Nonetheless, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the Pentagon made use of those tools when it launched strikes against Iran on Saturday morning.

Were experts surprised to see Claude on the front lines?

“Not at all,” Paul Scharre, executive vice president at the Center for a New American Security and author of Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, told Vox.

According to Scharre: “We’ve seen, for almost a decade now, the military using narrow AI systems like image classifiers to identify objects in drone and video feeds. What’s newer are large-language models like ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude that it’s been reported the military is using in operations in Iran.”

Scharre spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about how AI and the military are becoming increasingly intertwined — and what that combination could mean for the future of warfare.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

The people want to know how Claude or ChatGPT might be fighting this war. Do we know?

We don’t know yet. We can make some educated guesses based on what the technology could do. AI technology is really great at processing large amounts of information, and the US military has hit over a thousand targets in Iran.

They need to then find ways to process information about those targets — satellite imagery, for example, of the targets they’ve hit — looking at new potential targets, prioritizing those, processing........

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