Trump’s AI-Powered World Wars

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Mar 11, 2026

Guest

Hooman Majd

Hooman Majd, Iranian-American writer giving concise context on Iran’s politics and society. Nick Turse, senior reporter detailing the scale and civilian cost of U.S.-Israel air campaigns. Sam Biddle, technology reporter unpacking how AI speeds targeting and raises risks. They discuss relentless airstrike tempo, Pentagon AI targeting systems, regional fallout, and market pressure on war choices.

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INSIGHT

AI Speeds Targeting And Raises Civilian Risk

The Pentagon uses LLM-like systems to accelerate target selection and prioritization in airstrike campaigns.
Sam Biddle explains the Maven Smart System and how AI brings hyperspeed lists of buildings and people to destroy, increasing risk of civilian harm.

INSIGHT

Speeding Up Strikes Multiplies Mistakes

Rushing strikes with AI increases unintended civilian deaths because air war is already error-prone.
Biddle warns that using AI to hurry target decisions compounds mistakes and creates a scapegoat of 'the robot' when civilians die.

INSIGHT

Corporate Red Lines Can Be Circumvented

Tech firms publicly deny enabling autonomous killing or domestic surveillance but contracts and loopholes matter more than PR.
Sam Biddle notes Anthropic's rejection and how DoD can still access its Claude features via Palantir's Maven system.

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In the last few days, President Donald Trump has said that the U.S-Israel war on Iran will end soon, after oil prices jumped and the growing regional conflict continued to shake markets. After a wave of heavy bombardments throughout Iran, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth promised another round, “The most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes.”

“Hegseth has, yes, said that it's going to be basically death and destruction from the air, and they're delivering that,” Hooman Majd, an Iranian American writer and journalist, tells The Intercept Briefing.

“Killing civilians is a hallmark of American air war. This particular campaign Operation Epic Fury is set apart by the relentlessness of the attacks,” adds Nick Turse, senior reporter for The Intercept. “The two militaries — U.S. and Israel — combined were striking a conservative estimate of 1,000 targets per day in the first days of the conflict. Around 4,000 targets were hit in the first 100 hours of the campaign. For another point of comparison, Israeli attacks in the recent Gaza war were also relentless, but this far outpaces the Israeli campaign by more than double the number of strikes.” On Wednesday, Trump told Axios the war would end soon because there’s “practically nothing left to target."

This week on the The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy talked to Majd and Turse about the latest developments in the U.S. and Israel war on Iran and the growing number of conflicts the U.S. is engaged in. Senior technology reporter Sam Biddle also joined to discuss how artificial intelligence is being used in various U.S. conflicts.

“Airstrikes, air war generally is already so prone to killing innocent people even when you take your time. But whenever you try to hurry for the sake of hurrying — and AI is great at enabling that — you just increase over and over again the chance of killing someone that you didn’t intend to or didn’t care enough to avoid killing,” says Biddle. “So I think that is an immense risk of just accelerating the metabolism of killing from the air by drone, by airplane — with the stamp of ‘intelligence’ that these AI companies are really pushing.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

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