5 Ways Iran Is Exploiting AI in Warfare

The Islamic Republic of Iran has quietly become one of the world’s most aggressive adopters of artificial intelligence (AI) for warfare, deception, and repression. Tehran’s strategy is coherent and five-pronged, and the United States isn’t ready for it. Policymakers must contend with the hard truth that AI is now in the arsenal of every U.S. adversary — not unique to Iran but perfected there.

1. Iran weaponizes AI to sharpen cyber operations against American targets.

Iran has consistently punched above its weight when it comes to innovative cyberattacks. Whether using large language models for social engineering at scale or developing new types of malware, Iranian groups are constantly exploring how to use AI to accelerate the development of novel cyberattacks. Iran’s targets during the 2026 war have ranged from Fortune 500 companies like medical device maker Stryker, to small municipalities, like Saint Joseph County in Indiana. Despite Tehran’s appearance as a formidable cyber adversary, AI doesn’t give Iran capabilities it didn’t already have. It reduces requirements for time and talent and removes language barriers that previously limited how many operations Iranian groups could run simultaneously.

2. Iran is taking notes on how Russia is using AI to make Iranian-designed drones more lethal.

Starting in 2022, Iran provided Shahed-136 one-way attack drones and the technology to produce the systems to Russia, which termed the system “Geran-2.” Russia has produced and fired tens of thousands of the drones at Ukraine while continually working to improve the systems and the tactics associated with them. According to the Ukrainian military, Russia is using AI to generate flight plans for the drones, which can help them avoid Ukrainian air defenses. Given that Russia is now transferring the improved Gerans/Shaheds back to Iran as well as sharing tactics and intelligence, it would not be surprising to see Iran use similar techniques in the future. AI-enabled planning could shorten the kill chain and help the drones avoid being shot down, increasing their overall lethality.

3. Iran has bombed American AI data centers located overseas.

In the first days of the war, Iran bombed multiple Amazon Web Services data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates that form part of the AI commercial cloud infrastructure. The targeting wasn’t random. An IRGC-affiliated outlet later published a list of targets across the Gulf — focused on AWS, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Palantir, the companies underwriting the American AI stack and increasingly the American defense AI stack. Iran understands that AI now underpins America’s wartime advantage and that U.S.-UAE AI cooperation has been a flagship priority of American strategy in the Gulf. There is no longer a question of whether data centers constitute critical infrastructure but of how countries will partner with the private sector to protect them from acts of war.

4. Iran uses AI-generated propaganda to shape war-related narratives.

Iran is using AI propaganda along three distinct tracks. First are deepfakes to shape the war’s narrative abroad— fake footage of a downed American F-15 plane, fabricated images of rockets striking central Tel Aviv, and false claims that Israeli leaders had been killed or fled. The New York Times identified more than 110 unique deepfakes in the first two weeks of the Gulf conflict alone. More recently, the campaign has centered on viral Lego-animation videos depicting Iranian battlefield victories and humiliations of the Trump administration.

Second is content engineered for the domestic Iranian audience, including AI-generated depictions of the real U.S. strike on the Minab girls’ elementary school in February. These synthetic videos, which depict young girls playing on school grounds before the school is destroyed, are designed to channel Iranian outrage and consolidate support for the regime.

Third is amplification through aligned networks — sometimes authentic, as when Russian and Chinese state media echo Iranian narratives, and sometimes synthetic, as when Iranian operators run fake Western influencer accounts to launder pro-regime content into Western feeds.

5. Iran uses AI to surveil and silence its own people. 

The Islamic Republic uses AI-powered surveillance technology to oppress Iranians by identifying and tracking protesters, hindering any opposition movement from stabilizing. Iran’s regime built its facial recognition apparatus on Russian software acquired in 2023 (the same Russian system, FindFace, that the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned in 2024) and Chinese hardware. During the January massacres, when the Tehran regime killed an estimated 30,000 people, AI-powered facial recognition technology enabled identification of organizers, social media video review, post-protest tracking of the wounded through hospitals, and the disappearances and executions that followed. AI surveillance allows a regime to kill at this scale and then erase the evidence.

Leah Siskind is director of impact and an AI research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ (FDD’s) Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI). For more analysis from the author and FDD, please subscribe HERE. Follow FDD on X @FDDand @FDD_CCTI. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.