Israeli phone surveillance of Palestinians used for AI tool

Israel's military surveillance agency has used a vast collection of intercepted Palestinian communications to build a powerful artificial intelligence tool similar to ChatGPT that it hopes will transform its spying capabilities, an investigation by the Guardian can reveal.

- Harry Davies and Yuval Abraham Jerusalem

The joint investigation with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call has found that Unit 8200 trained the AI model to understand spoken Arabic using large volumes of phone conversations and text messages, obtained through its extensive surveillance of the occupied territories.

According to sources familiar with the project, the unit began building the model to create a sophisticated chatbot-like tool capable of answering questions about people it is monitoring and providing insights into the massive volumes of surveillance data it collects.

The elite eavesdropping agency, comparable in its capabilities with the US National Security Agency (NSA), accelerated its development of the system after the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023.

The model was still being trained in the second half of last year. It is not clear whether it has yet been deployed.