AI v Ayatollah: The World’s First Data War
AI Asymmetry: The Ayatollah brought a SQL Query to a Python fight.
Hello subscribers, and apologies for not sending a newsletter last week. Life here became, shall we say, challenging. Already in a war for almost 2 years, we’re now in another one, toe to toe against the Ayatollah himself (the head of the snake, Octopus, nuclear duck—pick your evil spirit animal). It’s too early to tell which way this will go—fantastic victory, endless attrition, blood-soaked surprise defeat. Nothing is OK and everything is normal. What’s certain is that most Israelis I know, myself included, are exhausted, deluded, stressed, worried, proud, hopeful, exhausted..
In this week’s edition I’ll focus on the AI aspects of this part of the war and what it means for where we might be headed.
As always, feedback to amir@israeltechinsider.com
The World’s First Data War
In just 11 days, Israel and Iran engaged in what might be remembered as the world’s first true AI-enhanced state-on-state war. But only one side showed up, Israel. The Ayatollah brought a SQL Query to a Python fight. Iran was fighting like it's still 2022.
This wasn’t a conflict defined by territory or troop movements. It wasn’t even about nuclear facilities or missile interceptions. It was about tempo. Israel didn’t just move faster—it thought faster. This war showed clear AI assymetry. Israel didn’t just dominate Iran’s sovereign airspace, it dominated the cognitive space. Israel's algorithms were writing death sentences faster than Iran's generals could read their morning briefings.
At the heart of that dominance: artificial intelligence fused with data intelligence, human intelligence, and tactical cunning. AI didn’t replace soldiers or spies. It augmented them. It extended their reach, amplified their speed, and stripped the friction out of kill chains. That’s what AI can do.
But it can’t do everything.
Israel, for all its tech supremacy, absorbed significant damage, and the Ayatollah remains unbowed. Israel's rocket interceptor stockpiles are running low. The new Jewish Space Laser isn’t yet battle ready. Ballistic missiles got through, causing death, destruction, and displacement. A tiny country 80 times smaller than Iran and already at war on 7 fronts, Israel cannot sustain a protracted war of attrition, especially one over 2,000km away. As for the stated aim of this war, no one knows with credible certainty if an Iranian atomic bomb is now more or less likely.
This War Will Be Benchmarked
The opening shots of the war were all about tempo and precision. At 4:30 AM on Friday 13 June, without warning and without visible operators, Mossad’s pre-assembled missiles came alive. Iranian air defense systems, and the sense of security that came with them, were erased in seconds. The strike reportedly used commercial-grade components like Moxa ioMirror E3210 controllers—hardware you could buy off eBay—combined with thermal cameras and pre-programmed self-destruct routines. Once used, the communications boxes were obliterated. The cameras, conspicuously intact. Message received: we see you, and we leave nothing behind but your confusion.
This was IKEA + AI warfighting: pre-assembled, sleek, modular, self-guided, disposable.
Next, Iran's top military brass and nuclear scientists were assassinated, many within the first 15 minutes. Most of them were taken out at home or in their offices. Next came a wave of precision bombings against the country's air defenses, rocket launchers, rockets, and key units. Within a few hours, Israel delivered the kinds of blows previous armies took years to achieve, if ever.
This is not simply about military capacity. It’s about the speed of perception and the paralysis of the adversary. While Iran was still counting how many generals it had lost, Israeli analysts were training the next model on new data on the generals' replacements.
Every Iranian move became training data. Israel's AI was in a reinforcement learning loop. Each Iranian response and movement taught the algorithm something new about Iranian capabilities, decision-making patterns, and vulnerabilities.
Israel was fighting a war to dominate the other side’s OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act), and turning it into a loading screen. And while Iran’s Revolutionary Guards still believes in flags, parades, martyrs, and sacred fire, Israeli forces swear by latency, inference, and proprietary chipsets. Kill chains are now written in Python, not Persian.
Israel's advantage wasn't just algorithmic—it's architectural. While Iran's command structure still relies on human-in-the-loop decision trees, Israeli systems have moved to human-on-the-loop automation. The difference: milliseconds versus minutes, inference versus deliberation. Israel sees the battlefield as a training dataset where engineers push updates in real time. The result was clear to see.
Cognitive Dominance ≠ Victory
But here’s where things get messy, and AI isn’t able to flip the script. While the cost of attacking is collapsing, the cost of defending is skyrocketing.
Iran reportedly fired off around 20% of its ballistic missile stockpile, yet its attacks were relentless, forcing millions of Israelis into bomb shelters day after day, night after night. It was nerve-wracking, exhausting, and damaging. And while Israel and the U.S. intercepted about 90% of the incoming rockets, the hit rate was dropping. Israel’s missile defense systems—the Arrow, David’s Sling, Iron Dome— aren’t cheap. And they were running hot. You don’t need a degree in economics—or warfare—to see the problem.
Despite its abilities, AI's blind spots are glaring. Algorithms excel at pattern recognition but struggle with strategic surprise. Iran's asymmetric responses—proxy warfare, cyber attacks, diplomatic pressure—don't fit neat training datasets. AI can predict where a missile will land but not why a leader might suddenly sue for peace or double down on destruction.
AI can win battles, but it can’t win the peace we crave. Israel has achieved something extraordinary: real-time kill-chains, preemptive targeting, multi-domain tempo control. But turning that into a strategic endgame is a human political problem. Israel just executed the first modern war of inference. But even with the fastest systems, peace remains a decidedly analog affair.
This war will be studied—not just by military tacticians, but by AI ethicists, technologists, and policymakers for years to come.
This is where the story is now most focused: did Iran manage to smuggle out the 400kg of 60% enriched uranium? if they did, where to? do they have a secret enrichment facility? can they still weaponize? Everything I've read and heard up to this point seems to point to the fact that nobody knows for certain. As a rule I do not allow myself to bask in optimism when it comes to what our enemies are capable of, certainly not after Oct 7.
Much, indeed most, of what you write seems correct, and sobering. The one comment with which I take issue is that it is unclear whether the events of the last week have made a nuclear armed Iran, more or less likely. From all that we know, it just doesn’t seem credible to me that Iran would not have weaponised their enriched uranium in the near future. While we don’t know their current capabilities, I find it challenging to believe that building a bomb is less likely. I am convinced their intent has not changed; Israel’s destruction is a core tenet of their theology, but even if they did smuggle their enriched uranium out of Fordow in 19th July, as they now claim, they must surely be further away from building a working bomb.