Israel Developing ChatGPT-like Tool That Weaponizes Surveillance of Palestinians

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE-AI, 10 Mar 2025

Yuval Abraham | +972 Magazine - TRANSCEND Media Service

The Israeli army is building an AI language model using millions of intercepted conversations between Palestinians, which could accelerate the process of incrimination and arrest, a joint investigation reveals.

An Israeli soldier photographs a Palestinian man using an AI facial recognition tool during a raid in Wadi Qutyna, Al-Mughayer, occupied West Bank, 17 Jan 2025.
(Avishay Mohar/Activestills)

6 Mar 2025 – The Israeli army is developing a new, ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence tool and training it on millions of Arabic conversations obtained through the surveillance of Palestinians in the occupied territories, an investigation by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and the Guardian can reveal.

The AI tool — which is being built under the auspices of Unit 8200, an elite cyber warfare squad within Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate — is what’s known as a Large Language Model (LLM): a machine-learning program capable of analyzing information and generating, translating, predicting, and summarizing text. Whereas LLMs available to the public, like the engine behind ChatGPT, are trained on information scraped from the internet, the new model under development by the Israeli army is being fed vast amounts of intelligence collected on the everyday lives of Palestinians living under occupation.

The existence of Unit 8200’s LLM was confirmed to +972, Local Call, and the Guardian by three Israeli security sources with knowledge of its development. The model was still being trained in the second half of last year, and it is unclear whether it has been deployed yet or how exactly the army will use it. However, sources explained that a key benefit for the army will be the tool’s ability to rapidly process large quantities of surveillance material in order to “answer questions” about specific individuals. Judging by how the army already uses smaller language models, it seems likely that the LLM could further expand Israel’s incrimination and arrest of Palestinians.

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