As the war in the Middle East enters its third week, intelligence gathered by the Pentagon is being analyzed by technology from the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, on a system run by the data analytics firm Palantir.
Drones created by defense tech start-up in Arizona have emerged as a key piece of the U.S. war arsenal.
And anti-drone systems made by a California start-up have been deployed to protect U.S. forces in the region.
Silicon Valley made risky bets in recent years on developing defense-related technology and providing services to the U.S. military establishment. Now those bets are paying off. From behemoths providing data systems to smaller companies offering novel weapons, tech firms such as Google, Palantir and OpenAI have found themselves at the heart of the U.S. war effort.
Their central role amounts to an “I told you so” moment. For years, the tech industry’s efforts on defense-related offerings faced skepticism and opposition, with no clear or immediate business rewards. Many Silicon Valley engineers opposed the use of powerful technologies for killing, battles and other military purposes — concerns that persist.
Despite those fears, venture capital firms have poured billions of dollars since last decade into start-ups building drones, lasers and other military systems. In January, Andreessen Horowitz, which was founded by the entrepreneurs Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, closed a new, almost $1.2 billion fund to invest in defense technologies.
In recent years, defense tech start-ups often plowed ahead with weapons prototypes before they had official government contracts. At the same time, executives like Alex Karp, the chief executive of Palantir, and others started cultivating more ties with the government.
Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. welcomed military technology, and President Trump has further embraced it. Last year, Mr. Trump issued an executive order calling for the military to update its system for acquiring technology so it could incorporate new tools faster. His domestic policy bill last year allocated $1 trillion to defense in 2026, including for technology offered by defense tech firms.
Now the war has cemented that work, most likely leading to more business between the tech industry and the defense establishment.
This month, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, agreed to bring his company’s A.I. systems onto the Pentagon’s classified networks. Google signed a deal to bring A.I. bots known as “agents” into the Defense Department. On Friday, the Army said it had awarded Anduril, a defense tech company, a $20 billion deal for A.I.-backed software to run on military systems.
“People are pointing to this moment as a proof point,” said Garrett Smith, a former lieutenant colonel and the chief executive of Reveal Technologies, which makes mapping technology for the Army.
“It has shown us that in creating and selling these technologies to the U.S. military, we are on the right track,” he added. “We have made the right investments.”
Pentagon officials said they were excited about how well new technology like A.I.-related systems had performed in the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. Two officers who were not authorized to speak publicly said the war was an inflection point in showing how modern technology could work with existing military systems.
Jack Shanahan, a retired Air Force lieutenant general who led the Pentagon’s efforts to incorporate A.I. during the Biden administration, said the war would speed the adoption of more technologies. Over the next decade, he expects legacy and modern systems to be melded together, along with more powerful A.I.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if this is called America’s first A.I. war,” Mr. Shanahan said.
But Amos Toh, a senior counselor at the Brennan Center for Justice, a New York nonprofit focused on law and public policy, cautioned that this gung-ho attitude might lead to little oversight of new systems and an overreliance on just a few tech companies. The military and the government still need “to take a look at the dependencies it is creating,” Mr. Toh said.
OpenAI, Google and the Pentagon did not respond to requests for comment. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
Project Maven, an A.I.-backed system built by Palantir for the Pentagon, is one prominent example of modern technology in the war. Maven works by layering Palantir’s data systems with A.I. technology from Anthropic. Anthropic’s systems analyze real-time data about battles and other war scenarios, while Palantir’s technology draws conclusions about what targets to strike.
Airstrikes hit more than 2,000 targets in Iran in the first four days of the war. Many of the targets were selected from a list produced by Maven after it analyzed information from drones, satellite imagery and other sources.
On Thursday, Palantir’s Mr. Karp said in a CNBC interview that A.I. was giving American forces an edge. Palantir’s stock has soared more than 12 percent since the war began.
“Our adversaries and enemies are witnessing our ability to fight that they don’t have, and they will find it very hard to acquire,” he said. “America is the center of the A.I. revolution.”
Palantir and Anthropic declined to comment.
Technologies from defense start-ups are also being deployed. A system that uses drones to counter other drones, called Merops, which was developed as a venture project by the former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, has become instrumental to protecting U.S. assets in the conflict. The system, which is small enough to be launched from the back of a pickup truck, uses A.I. to seek out and intercept drones before they can reach their targets.
Mr. Schmidt’s office declined to comment.
Small and lightweight drones called LUCAS from SpektreWorks, a start-up in Phoenix, have also been deployed in the battlefield. The LUCAS drones, which mimic Iran’s Shahed drones, are designed for one-way flights. They have been effective in overwhelming missile defense shields and engaging in the type of drone warfare first made popular in Ukraine, a U.S. official said.
SpektreWorks declined to comment on its work with the Pentagon.
This month, U.S. Central Command posted footage of rows of the drones as they were readied to be sent to American forces.
“I’d like to point out these drones were originally an Iranian design,” said Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of the Central Command. “We took them right back to America, made them better and fired them right back.”
Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst.
Sheera Frenkel is a reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area, covering the ways technology affects everyday lives with a focus on social media companies, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Telegram and WhatsApp.
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