For years, Silicon Valley operated as if war was someone else’s problem. Operation Epic Fury proved otherwise. The U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran, launched Feb. 28, pulled American technology companies to the center of active warfare — not as distant suppliers, but as participants and now deliberate targets. In my forthcoming book, “The New AI Cold War,” I warned this moment was coming. Iran made it real.
CENTCOM Commander Admiral Brad Cooper said it plainly in a March 11 video update: AI tools help U.S. forces sift through vast data in seconds so commanders make decisions faster than the enemy can react. Tasks that once took days now take seconds. Humans still approve the final targets. However, the machine does the analysis.
At the heart of that process is Palantir’s Maven Smart System, running on Anthropic’s Claude. NBC News confirmed that Palantir’s AI identified potential targets in ongoing strikes. The Washington Post reported AI enabled U.S. forces to hit 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours.
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Retired Admiral Mark Montgomery told CBS News the military now processes roughly a thousand targets a day with turnaround under four hours — a pace no previous campaign has matched. Palantir CEO Alex Karp confirmed on CNBC that Claude is still running inside the targeting system despite the supply chain designation.
As I document in “The New AI Cold War,” that shift is now baked into doctrine. The classic Observe-Orient-Decide-Act loop has shrunk to two steps: machines observe and decide; commanders orient and act. Strip away the jargon and the meaning is plain — the machine is now doing the thinking.
Operation Epic Fury did not emerge from a vacuum. Ukraine was the laboratory. As “The New AI Cold War” documents, Ukraine’s integration of Palantir’s MetaConstellation — drawing on Starlink satellites, weather data and civilian smartphone uploads — compressed Kyiv’s entire operations cycle to machine speed, helping offset Russia’s numerical advantage.
Ukraine retrained publicly available AI models on frontline combat data and deployed them across its drone fleet, boosting strike accuracy from 10–20% to 70–80%. Drones now account for 70–80 percent of battlefield casualties in Ukraine, with AI targeting added to platforms for as little as $25 per unit.
Russia absorbed those lessons and passed them to Tehran. The Kremlin supplied Iran with Shahed-136 drones upgraded with AI navigation that defeats GPS jamming — technology first tested against Ukraine. And China supplies roughly 80% of the critical technologies inside Russian drones. That coalition has been slow to register in Washington. It should not be.
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Iran drew the logical conclusion: if American military power flows through servers, destroy the servers. The IRGC-affiliated Tasnim News Agency published a target list naming Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, IBM, Oracle and Palantir — 29 locations across the UAE, Israel, Qatar and Bahrain — captioned “enemy’s technological infrastructure.”
This was not rhetoric. Iranian drone strikes had already hit two AWS data centers in the UAE and a third in Bahrain before the list appeared. AWS confirmed structural damage, disrupted power, and fire suppression at its facilities. Nvidia’s stock fell roughly 9% in two days. Wall Street finally caught up to what every strategist already knew: U.S. military power runs through servers as surely as it runs through F-35s.
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Consider the threat receiving almost no attention — and carrying the greatest economic consequence for Americans at home. AI runs on semiconductors. Semiconductors require helium — non-substitutable under current manufacturing processes. Qatar produces a third of the world’s helium at its Ras Laffan Industrial City. On March 2, Iranian drone strikes forced QatarEnergy to halt all production. Force majeure followed two days later. Subsequent strikes inflicted what QatarGas called “extensive” damage — annual helium exports cut 14%, repairs expected to take years.
Spot helium prices have doubled. Industry veteran Phil Kornbluth told CNBC six-week resumption is best-case and “highly unlikely.” South Korea sourced 64.7% of its helium from Qatar in 2025; Taiwan sourced 69% from Gulf nations in 2024. Together they hold 36% of global chip production. No helium. No chips. No AI. And without AI, the military edge carrying this war degrades with it.
Anthropic — whose Claude model is running target analysis in Iran — refused to allow its technology for autonomous lethal weapons or domestic surveillance. The Trump administration designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk” and moved to pull the contract. Anthropic sued. Pentagon spokeswoman Kingsley Wilson was blunt: “America’s warfighters … will never be held hostage by unelected tech executives and Silicon Valley ideology.”
Claude remains embedded through a six-month phase-out. OpenAI has offered classified network access. Google has deployed AI agents for non-classified military use. No settled rules govern what any of these systems are authorized to do. Not yet.
Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told NBC News the military’s use of AI in targeting raises unanswered questions and said flatly: “This has to be addressed.” He is right. Researchers call the underlying danger “automation bias” — operators under pressure defer to machine outputs rather than question them. The school strike in southern Iran that killed more than 170 people, most of them children, is the human face of what accountability failures in AI targeting look like.
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This war is proving, in real time, that technology infrastructure is military infrastructure. Data centers are wartime targets. A gas most people associate with party balloons is a strategic chokepoint. The world’s most powerful AI targeting system is running in combat while a federal court battle over who controls it plays out in Washington.
Ukraine proved AI reshapes battles. Iran is proving it reshapes everything else — supply chains, financial markets and the companies that built these tools. Every American with a car, a smartphone, a pacemaker or an MRI machine has a stake in how this ends.
The battlefield came to Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley was not ready.
