Since Oct. 7, the Israeli military has relied heavily on cloud and AI services from Microsoft and its partner OpenAI, while the tech giant’s staff embed with different units to support rollout, a joint investigation reveals.
By Yuval Abraham, +972 Magazine
Microsoft has a “footprint in all major military infrastructures” in Israel, and sales of the company’s cloud and artificial intelligence services to the Israeli army have skyrocketed since the beginning of its onslaught on Gaza, according to leaked commercial records from Israel’s Defense Ministry and files from Microsoft’s Israeli subsidiary.
The documents reveal that dozens of units in the Israeli army have purchased services from Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, in recent months — including units in the air, ground, and naval forces, as well as the elite intelligence squad, Unit 8200. Microsoft has also provided the military with extensive access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model, the engine behind ChatGPT, thanks to the close partnership between the two companies.
These revelations are the product of an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call in collaboration with The Guardian. It is based in part on documents obtained by Drop Site News, which has published its own story. The investigation shows how the Israeli army deepened its reliance on civilian tech giants after October 7, and comes amid growing protests by cloud company employees who fear that the technology they developed has helped Israel commit war crimes.
Army units revealed to be using services provided by Azure include the Air Force’s Ofek Unit, which is responsible for managing large databases of potential targets for lethal airstrikes (known as the “target bank”); the Matspen Unit, which is responsible for the development of operational and combat support systems; the Sapir Unit, which maintains the ICT infrastructure in the Military Intelligence Directorate; and even the Military Advocate General’s Corps, which is tasked with prosecuting Palestinians and lawbreaking soldiers in the occupied territories.
According to one document, as revealed today by The Guardian, Unit 81, the technological arm of the Military Intelligence Directorate’s Special Operations Division that manufactures surveillance equipment for the Israeli intelligence community, also receives cloud services and support from Azure.
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