Lee Gyu-lee is a business writer at The Korea Times, focusing primarily on IT & telecommunications, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and KOTRA. Prior to this, she has covered a wide range of cultural news, from film, television and K-pop to lifestyle and fashion.
AI emerges as key player in modern warfare
U.S. Department of War and Anthropic logos are seen in this illustration taken Sunday. Reuters-Yonhap
By Lee Gyu-lee
Claude, Gotham support US strike on Iran
Artificial intelligence (AI) has moved closer to the center of modern warfare, as evidenced by its role in the recent U.S.-Israeli military strike on Iran. No longer confined to serving as a purely analytical tool, AI functioned as an operational support layer that helped compress the time between intelligence gathering and battlefield execution.
According to U.S. media reports, the U.S. military used Anthropic’s AI model Claude for “intelligence assessments, target identification and simulating battle scenarios” during the massive joint U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran.
Palantir’s Gotham data platform is said to have played a key role in pinpointing key military facilities of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its leadership hideouts. In practice, when Palantir organized and summarized vast volumes of defense‑related data from satellites, signals intelligence and other classified sources, Claude then supported commanders by using that information to compare and analyze different operational scenarios.
Experts say the episode underscores a broader trend: AI’s role in military applications is poised to expand further, driven by its ability to accelerate decision-making and enhance operational precision.
“The recent case shows that AI has become so central to modern warfare that it is no exaggeration to call this an ‘AI war,’” said Choi Gi-il, professor of military studies at Sangji University.
Choi Byoung-ho, a collaboration professor at Korea University’s Human-Inspired AI Research, also noted that AI technology is likely to be adopted across the full spectrum of military operations, ranging from intelligence analysis to direct combat operations.
“It’s most likely that Claude was used primarily to analyze information, process and summarize data, and then report up to the stage right before a decision is made,” he said.
“We’ll reach a point where, when a human orders an agentic AI to attack, it could draw up an operations plan on its own, select the appropriate weapons, choose specific targets and carry out the actual weapons deployment — what Anthropic seems to have rejected (in this case). Technically, it is already possible, though the error margins are still quite large, and the technology will eventually get there.”
For Korea, the U.S. case highlights structural gaps, with domestic defense companies arguing that standards defining “defense AI” remain ambiguous and that access to sensitive military data, which is essential for training and deployment, is limited. Meanwhile, the military seeks systems ready for immediate operational use, creating friction between urgency and capability.
“(Military) tends to have little real understanding of the maturity of private sector technology or the constraints companies are facing, and that disconnect is creating serious friction. Expanding points of contact and closing that gap in speed and expectations is one of the biggest challenges for Korea’s defense AI today,” Choi Gi-il said.
Choi Byoung-ho noted that the Iran strike is a preview of choices that Korea will face as the country seeks to build its own foundation models, which would also be applied to defense.
“The fact that a foundation model was used in a war means it is really efficient. Thus, (Korea) will probably adapt its models to be used in war as well,” he said.
At the same time, experts warned that military adoption has outpaced global governance.
“Military and ethical positions, values and even ideological perspectives are now colliding. There needs to be an international agreement, some kind of normative framework or protocol, governing the military use of defense AI, but at present, such standards are virtually nonexistent,” Choi Gi-il said.
Choi Byoung-ho also noted that discussions on how countries can prevent foundation models developed by big tech firms in the U.S., China and elsewhere from harming humanity are essential, but would be hard to achieve imminently.
“At the international level, there needs to be a U.N.‑style convention that restricts these uses, but the problem is that Donald Trump has already torn down much of that framework,” he said. “So meaningful international solidarity is effectively not in place. Someone will have to rebuild that system of global cooperation and sanctions from scratch because Trump dismantled it, and that is likely to be a long way off.”