How AI helped Trump attack Iran
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 9 March 2026
⏱️ 31 minutes
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Summary
The use of Artificial Intelligence by militaries used to be talked about in the abstract, but during the US and Israel’s strikes on Iran we’ve seen it used in real time. So what happens when you have robots who can make battlefield decisions quicker than the speed of thought? And what made the Trump administration fall out with one of the world’s leading AI companies?
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Guest: David Leslie, Professor of ethics, technology and society in the Digital Environment Research Institute at Queen Mary University of London.
Host: Rosie Wright.
Producers: Harry Stott, Sophie McNulty.
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Read more: How AI helps 20 US troops do the work of 2,000 in Iran war
Further listening: Anthropic vs Pentagon: How AI is changing war
Clips: Fox, CBS News, Reuters.
Photo: Getty Images.
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Transcript
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| 0:31.1 | in the description of this episode. Thank you. |
| 0:36.1 | From the Times and the Sunday Times, this is the story. |
| 0:40.3 | I'm Rosie Wright. |
| 0:44.8 | As US and Israeli warplanes unleashed wave upon wave of attacks on Iran in this past week, |
| 0:51.9 | a team of intelligence operatives were working relentlessly behind |
| 0:56.0 | the scenes to identify which targets to strike. Now, 20 years ago, when the US invaded Iraq, |
| 1:04.1 | that team would have consisted of 2,000 plus people. Today, it's about 20. Why? Enter artificial intelligence. |
| 1:19.6 | Artificial intelligence is quietly becoming a central player on the battlefield, |
| 1:24.6 | speeding up targeting, analyzing intelligence, and raising new questions |
| 1:29.6 | about human oversight in war. |
| 1:32.7 | The use of AI and warfare has been long talked about in the abstract. |
| 1:37.2 | But clearly, the war in Iran has shown its use in real time, particularly the extraordinary |
| 1:43.7 | speed it's bringing to battlefield decision-making. |
| 1:47.4 | The real story here is how America's AI crushed Iran's response time. This isn't AI theory anymore. |
| 1:54.2 | This is AI combat and it's happening now. |
| 1:56.4 | But there's controversy right in the center of how exactly the U.S. military is using AI. |
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