Rights groups call for a halt of AI tech use in the military
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Access Now, Amnesty International among those citing Israeli use of AI in Gaza genocide as warning for future
AI robot signs are planted into the ground on the National Mall in an act of protest in Washington, DC, 6 March 2026 (Heather Diehl/AFP)
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Rights groups and tech activists have warned against the increasing use of AI in the military, specifically citing Israel's genocide in Gaza as a dangerous precedent.
In a joint statement signed by more than a hundred people and organisations including Amnesty International, Access Now and the Stop Killer Robots Campaign, they warned that the expansion of AI in military "kill chains" risked greater civilian bloodshed and a lack of accountability.
They specifically pointed to Israel's genocide in Gaza, where the mass killing of more than 73,000 Palestinians (thousands more are presumed dead or missing under the rubble) has accompanied the widespread use of AI-based systems by the Israeli army.
Three systems in particular - Lavender, Gospel, and Where’s Daddy - have been used to identify targets for air strikes based on Israeli mass surveillance records of Palestinians in Gaza.
This has been pointed to as one of the reasons for the scale of the death toll in Gaza, with targets chosen by AI software with little or no human oversight.
"The adoption of AI targeting systems in this campaign follows the example of the Israeli government’s weaponisation of data analysis and machine learning tools, powered by mass surveillance, in its genocidal attacks on Gaza," said the statement.
"By diluting human responsibility for life-and-death decisions, Israel’s use of systems such as Lavender, Gospel, and Where’s Daddy may contribute to the obfuscation of international crimes behind a veneer of perceived algorithmic objectivity while also obfuscating accountability."
The statement called on tech companies to stop providing AI support for Israel and other militaries, warning against the "normalisation and proliferation" of AI in warfare.
A number of tech companies have deepened their involvement in providing AI for military operations in recent years.
Open AI has announced its provision of AI services to the US Department of Defence (DoD), while Google has contracted with the DoD to “develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges across warfighting and enterprise domains".
Google DeepMind staff unionise over Israel and US military ties
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Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have also provided data storage, processing, and other enterprise infrastructure services to DoD “warfighting” programmes.
These moves have provoked a backlash from employees at tech companies, fearing they could be complicit in human rights abuses.
Last month, hundreds of workers in Google’s UK artificial intelligence division voted to unionise over concerns that its technology was being used by the US to wage war on Iran and by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza.
UK-based employees formally requested Google DeepMind to recognise the Communication Workers Union (CWU) and Unite the Union as their representatives in the workplace, in what organisers said could become the first unionisation effort at a major “frontier AI” lab globally.
In an internal vote among CWU members at DeepMind, 98 percent voted in favour of unionising. The workers at DeepMind said they were seeking an end to the use of Google AI by Israel and the US military.
Their demands also included restoring a scrapped commitment not to develop AI weapons or surveillance tools, creating an independent ethics oversight body, and the right of individuals to refuse to contribute to projects on moral grounds.
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