(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Microsoft has “a footprint in all major military infrastructure” in Israel, and the sale of the company’s cloud services and artificial intelligence to it Israeli army has been shooting up since the start of the attack on Gaza, according to leaked commercial documents from the Israeli Ministry of Defense and files from Microsoft's Israeli subsidiary.
The documents reveal that dozens of units in the Israeli army have purchased services from the company in recent months. Microsofts cloud computing platform, Azure – including units in the air, ground and naval forces – as well as the elite intelligence unit Unit 8200. Microsoft has also given the military extensive access to OpenAI's GPT-4 language model, the engine behind ChatGPT, thanks to it close the partnership between the two companies.
These revelations are the result of an investigation +972 Magazine and Local Call has carried out in collaboration with The GuardianIt is based in part on documents obtained by Drop Site News, which has published its own history. The study shows how the Israeli army became increasingly dependent on civilian technology giants after October 7, 2023. This happened in the middle of a period of increasing protests from employees of these companies, who fear that the technology they have developed has helped Israel commit war crimes.
Operational support systems
Among the units in the army that have been revealed to be using services Azure has delivered, we find the Air Force's Ofek unit, which is responsible for managing large databases of potential targets for lethal air strikes (known as the "target bank"). Also, the Matspen unit, which is responsible for the development of operational support systems and combat support systems; the Sapir unit, which maintains the ICT infrastructure in the Directorate for military intelligence#; and even the military Attorney General's Office, whose task is to prosecute Palestinians and law-breaking soldiers in the occupied territories.
According to a document that The Guardian recently revealed, receives Unit 81, the technological arm of the Military Intelligence Directorate's Special Operations Division, which produces surveillance equipment for the Israeli intelligence community, also cloud services and support from Azure.
The documents also show that Rolling The Stone# system, which the army uses to manage the population registry and movements of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, is maintained by Microsoft Azure. Azure is also used in a highly classified unit at the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, where Microsoft employees with security clearance must approve and oversee the delivery of cloud services.
OpenAI's GPT-4 and Azure
According to the documents, the AI services that include Ministry of Defense purchased from Microsoft, translation (about half of the average monthly spending during the first year of the war). OpenAI's GPT-4model accounted for about a quarter of the spending. Also, a speech-to-text conversion tool and an automated document analysis tool. In October 2023, the Army's monthly spending on Azure-delivered AI services was seven times higher than the month before the war, and in March 2024, it was 64 times higher.
The tools have been used for operational purposes – such as combat and intelligence.
While the documents do not specify how the various units in the army are using these cloud storage and AI tools, they indicate that about a third of the purchases were for ‘air-gap’ systems that are isolated from the internet and public networks, which strengthens the possibility that the tools were used for operational purposes – such as combat and intelligence – as opposed to purely logistical or bureaucratic functions. Two sources in Unit 820#0 confirmed that the military intelligence service purchased storage and AI services from Microsoft Azure to intelligence activities, and three other sources in the unit confirmed that similar services were purchased fra Amazons skyplattform, AWS.
The documents also show that Microsoft personnel work closely with units in the Israeli army to develop products and systems. Dozens of units have purchased “extended engineering services” from Microsoft, where “Microsoft experts become an integral part of [the customer’s] team,” according to the company’s website.
The documents describe, for example, that the military intelligence service has purchased private development meetings and professional workshops, which Microsoft experts have provided to soldiers at a cost of millions of dollars. Between October 2023 and June 2024 alone, the Israeli Ministry of Defense spent $10 million to purchase 19 hours of engineering support from Microsoft.
The army's operational capacity was "upgraded" during the ongoing war in Gaza.
An intelligence officer who has had a technology role in Unit 8200 in recent years, and who worked directly with Microsoft Azure employees before October 7th — to develop a system used to monitor Palestinians — told +972 and Local Call that the company’s developers became so integrated that he referred to them as “people who already work on the unit,” as if they were #soldiers.
The source adds that during the development phase, Microsoft Azure employees came to meetings at a military base to explore the possibility of building the monitoring system on top of the company's cloud infrastructure. "The idea was to manage this in Azure, since it [uses] so much data," he said.
Israel, October 30, 2020. (Flash90)
The “wonderful world” of cloud providers
Seven sources in the Ministry of Defense, the Army and the arms industry in Israel confirmed that since October 7, the army has become increasingly dependent on the services it purchases from civilians cloud providers to carry out operational activities in Gaza. According to army sources, the storage space and processing power offered by cloud providers enable soldiers to access far greater amounts of intelligence information – and for longer periods of time – than they would otherwise be able to do on their own internal servers.
Microsoft has not responded to a request for comment.
In 2021, the Israeli government published a tender for $1,2 billion to Project Nimbus, which is designed to transfer the information systems of ministries and security agencies to the public cloud servers of the winning companies and gain access to their advanced services. Microsoft was one of several companies that submitted bids for the tender, but ultimately lost to Amazon and Google.
Despite Microsoft's defeat in the Nimbus tender, the Defense Ministry continued to purchase services from them. The documents state that Microsoft has close ties to the Israeli Defense Ministry, managing projects related to "special and complex systems," including "sensitive workloads" that no other cloud company handles.
In August 2023, we can reveal, the Israeli army began purchasing OpenAIs latest language model, GPT-4. This tool, which the military accesses through Microsoft's Azure platform rather than directly from OpenAI, is capable of analyzing billions of data points, learning from past cases, and responding to spoken and written instructions.
When the war broke out, the army sharply increased its purchases of the GPT-4 engine: since October 2023, consumption has been 20 times higher than in the pre-war period. It is impossible to know from the documents whether the military used the GPT-4 in classified air-gapped systems or those that can connect to the internet.
The revelations in these documents are consistent with the statements of Colonel Racheli Dembinsky, head of the Israeli army's Center of Computing and Information Systems Unit ("Mamram"), which provides computing for the entire military. At a conference near Tel Aviv last July, which +972 and Local Call As previously revealed, Dembinsky said the army's operational capacity was "upgraded" during the ongoing war in Gaza, thanks to "the wonderful world of cloud providers," which enabled "tremendous operational efficiency."
This, Dembinsky said, was thanks to the “insane array of services, big data and artificial intelligence” that cloud providers offer – as the logos of Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) appeared on the screen behind her.
At the start of the ground invasion of Gaza in late October 2023, the army's systems were overloaded, and "resources were exhausted."
In his July talk, Dembinsky explained that the army began working more intensively with cloud companies due to the demands of the war. By the start of the ground invasion of Gaza in late October 2023, the army’s systems were overloaded, and “resources were exhausted.” This lack of storage space and processing power, Dembinsky said, led to a decision in the military to “go outside, to the civilian world,” where it was possible to buy AI tools and computing power “without any glass ceiling.”
In August, an IDF spokesperson stressed to +972 and Local Call that “IDF classified information is not transferred to civilian providers and remains within the IDF’s segregated network” – even though the investigation conducted at the time showed that the Israeli army had in fact stored some intelligence information gathered through mass surveillance of the Gaza population on servers managed by , azon#s AWS.
This time, Israel's army and defense ministry declined to comment.
Harry Davies of The Guardian contributed to this
the article. Translated by the MODERN TIMES editor.
