Israel developing ChatGPT-like tool that weaponizes surveillance of Palestinians
Palestinians cross Qalandiya checkpoint on their way from the West Bank to the fourth Friday prayer of Ramadan in Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, 29 April 2022
Yuval Abraham reports in +972 on 6 March 2025:
The Israeli army is developing a new, ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence tool and training it on millions of Arabic conversations obtained through the surveillance of Palestinians in the occupied territories, an investigation by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and the Guardian can reveal.
The AI tool — which is being built under the auspices of Unit 8200, an elite cyber warfare squad within Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate — is what’s known as a Large Language Model (LLM): a machine-learning program capable of analyzing information and generating, translating, predicting, and summarizing text. Whereas LLMs available to the public, like the engine behind ChatGPT, are trained on information scraped from the internet, the new model under development by the Israeli army is being fed vast amounts of intelligence collected on the everyday lives of Palestinians living under occupation.
The existence of Unit 8200’s LLM was confirmed to +972, Local Call, and the Guardian by three Israeli security sources with knowledge of its development. The model was still being trained in the second half of last year, and it is unclear whether it has been deployed yet or how exactly the army will use it. However, sources explained that a key benefit for the army will be the tool’s ability to rapidly process large quantities of surveillance material in order to “answer questions” about specific individuals. Judging by how the army already uses smaller language models, it seems likely that the LLM could further expand Israel’s incrimination and arrest of Palestinians.
“AI amplifies power,” an intelligence source who has closely followed the Israeli army’s development of language models in recent years explained. “It allows operations [utilizing] the data of far more people, enabling population control. This is not just about preventing shooting attacks. I can track human rights activists. I can monitor Palestinian construction in Area C [of the West Bank]. I have more tools to know what every person in the West Bank is doing. When you hold so much data, you can direct it toward any purpose you choose.”
While the tool’s development predates the current war, our investigation reveals that, after October 7, Unit 8200 sought the assistance of Israeli citizens with expertise in the development of language models who were working at tech giants like Google, Meta, and Microsoft. With the mass mobilization of reservists at the start of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, industry experts from the private sector began enlisting in the unit — bringing knowledge that was previously “accessible only to a very exclusive group of companies worldwide,” as one security source stated,