Iran names 18 US tech companies as military targets

On Tuesday, a new front was carved out by Iran, not across deserted lands or along a disputed border line, but through the server farms, cloud sites and corporate facilities of America’s biggest tech companies. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps published a statement on its official Sepah News, naming 18 American companies, from Apple and Microsoft to Nvidia and Palantir, as “legitimate targets” in retaliation for what it described as their role in supporting American and Israeli assassination operations inside Iran.

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The list includes Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, Cisco, Oracle, Dell, HP, IBM, JPMorgan Chase, Tesla, General Electric, Boeing and Palantir, as well as Spire Solutions and G42, the Abu Dhabi-based AI firm that has become a centerpiece of the Gulf’s AI ambitions. The Revolutionary Guards issued an immediate evacuation notice to employees of these companies across the Middle East, urging anyone within a kilometer of their facilities to leave.

The threat is extraordinary in its specificity. Rather than targeting military installations or government buildings, the Revolutionary Guards have identified private sector technology infrastructure as the mechanism through which they claim the United States is tracking and killing senior Iranian officials. The statement said that US ICT and artificial intelligence companies are “key to planning and tracking terrorist targets” and that “for every assassination and terrorist act in Iran, a facility or unit belonging to these companies will face destruction.”

The accusation is not unfounded. Since the launch of Operation Epic Fury on February 28, the United States has struck more than 10,000 targets inside Iran, according to U.S. Central Command. The Israel Defense Forces claimed to have killed 40 senior commanders in a single operation that the IDF described as possible only because of military intelligence capabilities.

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Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on his compound the same day. Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh and Revolutionary Guards commander Mohammad Pakpour followed. Dozens of high-ranking political and military officials, along with members of their families, have been killed in what Tehran describes as a sustained campaign of US-Israeli aggression.

It is the role of artificial intelligence in supporting this campaign that has prompted the Revolutionary Guards to turn to commercial technology infrastructure as a theater of war. Bloomberg reported in late March that Palantir’s chief technology officer described the conflict in Iran as the first major war driven by artificial intelligence, with advanced tools that process vast data sets to speed up targeting decisions.

The US military has confirmed the use of artificial intelligence for drone navigation, intelligence analysis and what it calls “target selection tools,” although it maintains that a human remains in the decision-making loop. The journal Nature published an editorial calling for a moratorium on artificial intelligence in warfare until international law is adjusted.

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The Revolutionary Guards’ logic, however twisted, is this: if American cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and surveillance platforms provide the infrastructure that enables precision attacks, then the companies that operate that infrastructure are combatants. It’s a formulation that international humanitarian law does not clearly support.