AI War Cloud

When the bots, recommender systems, and automated agents many people use daily are the same technologies used to wage war, how should we understand and hold these systems to account? Ultimately, what responsibilities do tech makers and users have in choosing AI tools, when their development also leads to deadly outcomes at massive scales? With the spotlight now on systems like Ukraine’s Palantir MetaConstellation and Israel’s Lavender, the stakes for machine learning tasks are increasingly urgent and personal.

This project examines the specific machine learning tasks used in military “AI Decision Support Systems” (AI-DSS). These combine massive amounts of data and processing to help make choices about who lives or dies, speeding up the process exponentially. The research presents a database that details how the training datasets, models, and inferences military tools rely on are the very same types used by consumers. It shows how these are also deployed by, or even upon, citizens of the countries that first developed them, after they are tested on vulnerable foreign populations in conflict zones.

AI War Cloud won the S+T+ARTS Prize - Grand Prize for Artistic Exploration at Ars Electronica 2025.