Israel’s intelligence persuading the Trump administration to launch its weekend strikes on Iran may have been based on the conclusions of an Israeli AI program. This is an ominous sign.
Back in 2015, global surveillance firm Palantir contracted with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an international nuclear watchdog group, to help the IAEA in its mission to monitor Iran’s nuclear weapons development program. At the core of this mission was an artificial intelligence construct codenamed “Mosaic.”
The idea was to have a more foolproof enforcement mechanism for the IAEA’s oversight of the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that was enacted in 2015. Rather than having scores of analysts physically poring over hundreds, if not thousands, of satellite imagery and assessments on targets, like Iran’s various nuclear weapons facilities, the IAEA wanted to streamline the process.
Palantir came forward with a product that would allow them to do just that. The $50 million Mosaic AI-powered software would sift through more than 400 million data points to forecast Iran’s nuclear trajectories.
Originally designed for counterterrorism and intelligence operations, this predictive artificial intelligence system operates not by collecting data points from the targets it is tracking, but instead makes inferences based on data analyses of satellite imagery, trade logs, metadata, and social media posts about the target. It’s a fascinating technology and if there is one company that would absolutely make such a program work, it is Palantir—which, not coincidentally, is also a top contractor of the Central Intelligence Agency.
A variation of the same program has been used by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) in its ongoing counterterrorism campaign against Iranian-backed terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. The Mosaic program was in fact derived from this older system sold to the IDF by Palantir.
Palantir’s Mosaic AI: Minority Report for Uranium?
Critics of the Mosaic program have disparagingly referred to it as “Minority Report for uranium”—referencing the Steven Spielberg film in which criminals are arrested and punished before their crimes occur. One critic described it as “pretext fuel” for sanctions and strikes against Iran. Of course, the Iranians never really helped their case. Even during the uncertain days of Obama’s JCPOA, Tehran was still funding major terrorism operations throughout the Mideast, threatening Israeli, Arab, and American targets in the region, and constantly insinuating that they were still developing nuclear weapons.
Then again, Saddam Hussein behaved exactly the same way in the run-up to George W. Bush’s quixotic invasion of Iraq in 2003—mostly in an attempt to puff himself up before both would-be regional adversaries and his own dubiously loyal underlings. After the invasion, all evidence showed that Saddam’s various boasts about possessing nukes, along with the Bush administration’s claims about that possession, were wrong. America went to war on false pretexts.
Now that the war between Israel, the United States, and Iran has come to a tentative, if inauspicious, conclusion, many are confused as to why this war began when and how it did. To many people, it seemed like this major conflict in the Middle East, that absolutely could have led into something far worse than what it has ended up being, simply fell from the geopolitical sky.
There was no real warning it was coming.
What’s more, the Trump administration’s own Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, had recently testified to Congress that the combined assessment of US intelligence was that Iran did not possess nuclear weapons and that Tehran had abandoned the pursuit of nukes as far back as 2003. This was not necessarily Gabbard’s personal opinion. As DNI, she was merely reporting to lawmakers the consensus of the US intelligence community, in accordance with her constitutional duty.
Three months after that testimony, new, actionable intelligence was presented to the Trump administration by their allies in Israel. Yet according to most US intelligence sources, no one in the US intelligence community has been given the opportunity to probe Israel’s intelligence, let alone inquire as to its true source—and hence its veracity.
This is conspicuously similar to what happened in the run-up to the Iraq War when, an Iraqi source codenamed “Curveball” found his way into the custody of Germany’s intelligence service. Curveball proceeded to spin a tale of a massive Iraqi plot to create weapons of mass destruction with which to feed terrorist groups, like al Qaeda, to conduct sweeping waves of terrorism upon the United States.
But Curveball was a liar, and his intelligence was total fabrication. The CIA might have learned this if it had been allowed to question him. But Curveball’s German handlers forbade the CIA from either speaking directly with the subject, or from directly assessing the sourcing of his alleged intelligence. Without a dissenting look, Curveball’s claims were accepted as fact, and widely circulated in Western media ahead of the invasion. In a 2007, New York Times essay by Christopher Dickey—ironically titled “Artificial Intelligence”—it was confirmed that “Curveball” was an Iraqi dissident who very badly wanted to see Saddam Hussein’s regime overthrown and was willing to lie and manipulate the United States into helping him achieve this goal.
Might past be prologue? Former British diplomat Alastair Crooke has claimed on his Substack page, Conflicts Forum, that the intelligence Israel used to convince the Trump White House of an impending nuclear weapons danger from Iran two weeks ago was “coaxed” from metadata analysis conducted by the IAEA’s Mosaic AI program.
Per Crooke: “The IAEA Board’s ‘Non-Compliance’ Resolution on 12 June 2025 was the planned precursor for Israel’s ‘bolt from the blue’ strike on Iran the next day. Israelis say the plan to go to war with Iran was grounded in ‘the opportunity’ to strike, and not the intelligence that Iran was speeding towards a bomb (that was the peg for war).”
In short, despite Jerusalem’s protestations that its intelligence was sound, it would appear that Palantir’s Mosaic predictive AI system played a major role in making the case to an otherwise reluctant Donald Trump that the time to strike Iran was June 13, 2025. And while the technology involved is extremely interesting, the fact of the matter is that basing a major regional war off the predictions of an AI seems very dangerous—especially since AI is itself a relatively new and still developing technology.
Going to War on Predictive Modeling Seems Dangerous
In other words, the decision to strike Iran on June 13, 2025 was not based on any real intelligence whatsoever. It was based on computer models!
We really have no clue how effective this technology is in predicting nuclear weapons development in such an opaque and inherently unpredictable state, like the Islamic Republic of Iran. Artificial intelligence, especially right now, gets things wrong. It’s a work in progress. People are still debating whether it’s safe to allow for AI to operate self-driving cars. Yet Israel—and by extension Trump—seem to have based a large portion of their justification for going to war on intelligence based on the predictive musings of AI.
Thus far, it seems to have all worked out. But that is less because of the Mosaic AI system used to predict an Iranian nuclear weapons breakout, and more of a product of President Trump’s overriding desire to avoid regime change military operations. In other words, the very human element of Trump and his team ensured that this conflict didn’t become World War III, as so many understandably feared it would become.
This whole war could have gone quite badly, though—much as Iraq did. That so much of its justification might have been based on predictions from an AI should give everyone, especially intelligence professionals, pause. It should certainly prompt a major after-action investigation into the intelligence collection methods the Trump and Netanyahu administrations used to initiate major hostilities. This is doubly the case because Trump’s own DNI testified that all 17 US intelligence agencies strongly disagreed with Israel’s claims. Only one can be right.
About the Author: Brandon J. Weichert
Brandon J. Weichert, a Senior National Security Editor at The National Interest as well as a contributor at Popular Mechanics, who consults regularly with various government institutions and private organizations on geopolitical issues. Weichert’s writings have appeared in multiple publications, including the Washington Times, National Review, The American Spectator, MSN, the Asia Times, and countless others. His books include Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life, and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy. His newest book, A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine is available for purchase wherever books are sold. He can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
Image: Shutterstock / Anelo.
