Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei has ordered Iran’s security forces to sharply expand their use of artificial intelligence, accelerating Tehran’s military modernization as its conflict with Israel intensifies. In a message marking National Police Week, Khamenei said “comprehensive strengthening of the forces responsible for safeguarding security” — including AI-assisted data analysis — would improve police capabilities and help them carry out operations.
The directive comes two years after Iran’s first direct military confrontation with Israel in 2024. It signals a strategic turn: Iran is racing to bring autonomous weapons systems, drone-targeting algorithms and AI-driven intelligence analysis into its armed forces, despite crippling international sanctions that limit access to advanced computer chips.
The AI Arms Race
Iran isn’t alone in using artificial intelligence for military purposes, but its approach highlights the imbalance shaping regional security. Admiral Brad Cooper, commander of US Central Command, said in March that American AI systems “allow us to analyse large volumes of data within seconds, enabling our leaders to make the right decisions faster than the enemy amid the noise.” Cooper said advanced AI tools had cut processes that typically took hours or days down to seconds. Still, he stressed a key limit: “However, the final decision is always made by a human: what to strike, what not to strike, and when to strike.”
Iran’s commitment looks markedly different. During military exercises last year, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced it was using AI in drones developed domestically, including missiles that can autonomously lock on to moving targets. That distinction points to a shift toward automated targeting without human decisions at critical moments.
Brigadier General Kioumars Heydari, then commander of the army’s ground forces and now deputy chief of staff, called AI “one of our priorities to maximise our defensive power.” Describing AI development as defensive obscures Iran’s stated strategy: an official roadmap aims to make the country one of the world’s top 10 AI powers by 2032, with AI accounting for 12 percent of its gross domestic product. The deadline is close. Six years remain, and the regional war has already sped up efforts to bring autonomous systems into Iran’s military.
The Civilian Cost
The dangers of AI-dependent military decisions became clear in March, when the United States bombed an elementary school in Minab, southern Iran, on the first day of the regional war. More than 150 people died, many of them schoolgirls. A September report by Bloomberg said overreliance on AI tools, along with outdated intelligence and imagery, contributed to the strike. The Pentagon’s full investigation findings haven’t been made public.
Khamenei praised Iran’s security forces for keeping order “despite repeated US and Israeli attacks,” and accused Washington and Tel Aviv of deliberately targeting police commanders and personnel. He said the attacks had failed to weaken the forces’ operational capacity. Yet his call for greater AI investment shows a security establishment that sees its vulnerabilities: technological gaps it must close to compete with adversaries that have superior chip manufacturing and software development infrastructure.
Iran faces a contradiction. It needs advanced AI systems to defend against countries that possess them, but international sanctions restrict access to the core technologies — advanced semiconductors, cloud computing infrastructure and cutting-edge algorithms — that make sophisticated autonomous systems possible. Iran has responded by speeding up domestic development and putting existing capabilities to military use, even as the dangers of autonomous targeting without adequate human oversight grow clearer.
Why This Matters:
Iran’s effort to weaponize AI at scale marks a fundamental shift in regional military dynamics. An Iran with autonomous drone swarms and AI-driven targeting systems would pose a far greater threat to Israeli and US military assets across the Middle East. AI’s spread to terrorist-linked militias — including Hezbollah proxies armed and funded by Tehran — would make defensive operations harder for Israel, which relies on technological superiority to offset demographic and geographic disadvantages.
The Minab school bombing shows the cost when AI-dependent military systems combine with inadequate intelligence and failures of human judgment. This arms race is likely to make regional conflict increasingly dependent on autonomous weapons and algorithmic decisions, while civilians bear the consequences of AI failures and systems designed to reduce human deliberation in targeting.