Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei has called for Iran to dramatically expand its use of artificial intelligence in security and military operations. The appeal signals an accelerated defense posture amid the ongoing regional conflict with Israel and the United States.
In a message marking National Police Week, Khamenei said Iran needed “comprehensive strengthening” of its security forces, backed by investment in “advanced technology, such as the purposeful use of artificial intelligence in data analysis.” His statement reflects a broader strategy to bring AI into Iran’s armed forces, despite international sanctions that restrict access to advanced computing chips.
Iran’s push toward AI-dependent warfare comes two years after its first direct military confrontation with Israel in 2024. Across the region, autonomous systems, algorithmic targeting and data-driven decision-making are rapidly changing military infrastructure.
The Acceleration of Military AI
Iran aims to rank among the world’s top 10 AI powers by 2032—six years away—and wants AI to contribute 12 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product. This isn’t a distant ambition. Last year, during military exercises, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps reported that it already used AI in domestically developed drones, including missiles capable of autonomously locking on to moving targets.
In April, Brigadier General Kioumars Heydari, commander of the army’s ground forces and now deputy chief of staff, called AI “one of our priorities to maximise our defensive power.” The language is clinical. The implications aren’t.
Khamenei praised Iran’s security forces for “maintaining order despite repeated US and Israeli attacks,” and accused both countries of “deliberately targeting police commanders and personnel.” He claimed the attacks hadn’t undermined operational capacity, but offered no evidence.
Questions About Civilian Safety
The concern isn’t just Iran’s development of AI systems; it’s how they’re deployed, and who pays when algorithms fail.
On the first day of the latest regional war in late February, the United States bombed an elementary school in Minab, southern Iran. More than 150 people died, many of them schoolgirls. A September report by Bloomberg found that overreliance on AI tools, combined with outdated intelligence and imagery, contributed to the strike. The Pentagon hasn’t released its full investigation findings.
Admiral Brad Cooper, commander of US Central Command, defended AI’s military use in March. Advanced AI systems, he said, “allow us to analyse large volumes of data within seconds, enabling our leaders to make the right decisions faster than the enemy.” He added that AI reduced processes “that typically took hours, and sometimes days, to mere seconds.”
But Cooper also acknowledged a crucial limitation: “However, the final decision is always made by a human: what to strike, what not to strike, and when to strike.”
That human judgment didn’t prevent the Minab school bombing. It didn’t stop dozens of children from dying.
The Regional Spiral
Iran and the United States are now locked in an AI arms race in one of the world’s most volatile regions. Khamenei’s call for expanded AI investment signals Iran intends to deepen the competition, regardless of the risks to civilians caught between military technologies they didn’t choose.
Autonomous systems can lock on to targets without human intervention, analyze data faster than human cognition allows and operate amid incomplete intelligence. Their integration into warfare creates conditions for the kind of catastrophic error that killed schoolchildren in Minab.
Neither side has shown that AI can reliably replace human judgment. Both are betting their security—and civilians’ lives—that it can.
Why This Matters:
As Iran and the United States integrate AI into military operations across the Middle East, preventing human costs becomes harder, while justifying them becomes easier. The Minab school bombing illustrates a specific danger: AI systems promise precision and speed, but rely on data that’s often incomplete, imagery that’s outdated and algorithms trained on patterns that don’t account for schools, hospitals or the irreducible fact of civilian presence. When military operations rely on machines to recommend targets and humans merely execute those recommendations, the accountability gap widens. The regional conflict that began two years ago isn’t being resolved through diplomacy. Technology is accelerating it. Without international frameworks governing AI use in warfare, civilians in Iran, Israel and across the Middle East will bear the consequences of systems designed to act faster than ethics can follow.