Claude and Grok Are at War in Iran, and Americans Have No Idea

The US government has empowered America’s AI giants to set their own rules for their models’ use in warfare, without asking or informing the public.

By Jonathan Guyer | Oct 1, 2026Originally published by The National Interest

The guided-missile destroyer USS Delbert D. Black fires a Tomahawk Land Attack Missile in support of Operation Epic Fury, February 28, 2026. US Navy

Claude has helped select and prioritize targets in Iran. Grok coordinated the thousands of missiles it launched in the first days of the war. And ChatGPT is a veteran of Israel’s Gaza war.

There’s something absurd about the fact that AI models that most users have tasked with writing grocery lists or summarizing emails are undergirding the new “forever wars” in the Middle East. Yes, Grok, it’s true: most Americans—who live in a country with one of the highest penetration rates of AI use anywhere in the world—don’t realize that these consumer technologies are also powering President Donald Trump’s ongoing war in Iran. AI-enabled technologies have supercharged American military operations, yet 42 percent of Americans have heard nothing about it.

My organization, the Institute for Global Affairs, worked with YouGov to field a nationally representative survey of voting-age Americans on the Iran war. Only 8 percent of Americans have heard a lot about AI’s role in the war, while a majority of Americans (63 percent) have heard “only a little” or “nothing at all.”

Though many of these military tech companies advertise their advanced algorithmic warfare on Washington, DC, buses or at Reagan National Airport, the public has been excluded from the conversation. Last year, I argued in the Financial Times that the public deserved answers; our own polling showed that a majority of Americans want stricter rules around AI’s military uses.

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