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Hello and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. I am Matthew Galt.

Jason Fields is off doing God knows what on the streets of New York City today. And we are jumping right into it.

I'm here with Garence Burke and Michael Besecker of the Associated Press. They've done some incredible

reporting on how Israel is using AI in its war in its war on Gaza and against Hamas.

Thank you both so much for joining me today.

Thank you for having us.

So I want to be kind of specific up at the top.

I think when we talk about AI, there's a tendency to kind of lump a whole bunch of stuff together under that banner.

So when we say AI here, what exactly do we mean?

Sure.

So, I mean, people may know that for years,

militaries have been hiring private companies to build custom autonomous weapons,

drones, et cetera.

But what we reported on is this leading instance in which commercial AI models, so think

the kinds of models made in Silicon Valley that can do everything from translate or

transcribe what people say to find patterns in big troves of data are being used by the Israeli military.

So it's not something purpose built for the military. It's something kind of commercial,

what we would say is like off the shelf that's been picked up by them. That's right. Yeah. And I think

that's one of the things that really interested us here is

talking with some of the Israeli military officials who we were able to reach about their use of

these general purpose AI models, which hasn't really happened much in an active war before now.

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