Since October 7, 2023 the Israeli military has relied heavily on cloud and AI services from Microsoft and its partner OpenAI, while the tech giant’s staff is embedded with different units to support rollout, a joint investigation reveals.
Microsoft has a ‘footprint in all major military infrastructures’ in Israel, and sales of the company’s cloud and artificial intelligence services to the Israeli army have skyrocketed since the beginning of its onslaught on Gaza, according to leaked commercial records from Israel’s Defence ministry and files from Microsoft’s Israeli subsidiary.
The documents reveal that dozens of units in the Israeli army have purchased services from Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, in recent months — including units in the air, ground, and naval forces, as well as the elite intelligence squad, Unit 8200. Microsoft has also provided the military with extensive access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model, the engine behind ChatGPT, thanks to the close partnership between the two companies.
These revelations are the product of an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call in collaboration with The Guardian. It is based in part on documents obtained by Drop Site News, which has published its own story. The investigation shows how the Israeli army deepened its reliance on civilian tech giants after October 7, and comes amid growing protests by cloud company employees who fear that the technology they developed has helped Israel commit war crimes.
Army units revealed to be using services provided by Azure include the Air Force’s Ofek Unit, which is responsible for managing large databases of potential targets for lethal airstrikes (known as the ‘target bank’); the Matspen Unit, which is responsible for the development of operational and combat support systems; the Sapir Unit, which maintains the ICT infrastructure in the Military Intelligence Directorate; and even the Military Advocate General’s Corps, which is tasked with prosecuting Palestinians and lawbreaking soldiers in the occupied territories.
According to one document, as revealed recently by The Guardian, Unit 81, the technological arm of the Military Intelligence Directorate’s Special Operations Division that manufactures surveillance equipment for the Israeli intelligence community, also receives cloud services and support from Azure.
The documents additionally indicate that the ‘Rolling Stone’ system, which the army uses to manage the population registry and movement of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, is maintained by Microsoft Azure. Azure is also used in a highly classified unit inside the Israeli prime minister’s Office, where Microsoft employees with security clearance are required to sign off and oversee the provision of cloud services.
According to the documents, the AI services that the Defence ministry purchased from Microsoft include translation (about half of the average monthly consumption during the first year of the war), OpenAI’s GPT-4 model (about a quarter of the consumption), a speech-to-text conversion tool, and an automatic document analysis tool. In October 2023, the army’s monthly consumption of AI services provided by Azure jumped sevenfold compared to the month preceding the war; by March 2024, it was 64 times higher.
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Although the documents do not specify how the different army units use these cloud storage and AI tools, they do indicate that about a third of the purchases were intended for ‘air-gapped’ systems that are isolated from the internet and public networks, strengthening the possibility that the tools have been used for operational purposes — such as combat and intelligence — as opposed to simply logistical or bureaucratic functions. Indeed, two sources in Unit 8200 confirmed that the Military Intelligence Directorate purchased storage and AI services from Microsoft Azure for intelligence-gathering activities, and three other sources in the unit confirmed that similar services were purchased from Amazon AWS.
The documents further 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, in which, according to the company’s website, ‘Microsoft experts become an integral part of the [customer’s] team.’
The documents describe, for example, that in recent years the Military Intelligence Directorate has purchased private development meetings and professional workshops, which Microsoft’s experts have given to soldiers at a cost of millions of dollars. Between October 2023 and June 2024 alone, the Israeli Defence ministry spent $10 million to purchase 19,000 hours of engineering support from Microsoft.
An intelligence officer who served in a technological role in Unit 8200 in recent years, and worked directly with Microsoft Azure employees before October 7 to develop a surveillance system used to monitor Palestinians, told +972 and Local Call that the company’s developers became so embedded that he referred to them as ‘people who are already working with the unit,’ as if they were soldiers.
The source added that during the development phase, Microsoft Azure staff came for meetings at an army base to examine the possibility of building the surveillance system on top of the company’s cloud infrastructure. ‘The idea was that this thing should be managed in Azure, because it [uses] so much data,’ he said.
Seven sources in the Israeli Defence ministry, the army, and the arms industry confirmed that since October 7, the army has become increasingly dependent on the services it purchases from civilian cloud providers for operational activity in Gaza. According to army sources, the storage space and processing power provided by the cloud companies enables soldiers to make use of vastly greater quantities of intelligence information — and for longer periods of time — than they could otherwise maintain on their own internal servers.
Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.
The ‘wonderful world of cloud providers’
In 2021, the Israeli government published a $1.2 billion tender for Project Nimbus, designed to transfer the information systems of government ministries and security bodies to the public cloud servers of the winning companies and get access to their advanced services. Microsoft was one of several companies that submitted a bid for the tender, but in the end lost out to Amazon and Google.
Despite Microsoft’s defeat in the Nimbus tender, the Defence ministry continued to purchase services from the cloud giant. In particular, the documents state that Microsoft retains deep ties to Israel’s Defence ministry through managing projects relating to its ‘special and complex systems,’ including ‘sensitive workloads’ that no other cloud company deals with.
In August 2023, we can reveal, the Israeli army began purchasing OpenAI’s latest language model, GPT-4. This tool, to which the military acquires access through the Azure platform rather than directly from OpenAI, is capable of analysing billions of pieces of information, learning from past cases, and responding to spoken and written instructions.
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Once the war began, the army sharply increased its acquisitions of the GPT-4 engine: since October 2023, its consumption has been 20 times greater than during the pre-war period. From the documents, it is impossible to know whether the military used GPT-4 in classified air-gapped systems or those that can connect to the internet.
OpenAI did not respond to questions about its knowledge of how the Israeli army uses its products. A spokesperson for the company simply said: ‘OpenAI does not have a partnership with the IDF.’
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In recent years, Microsoft has reportedly invested about $13 billion in OpenAI. In May, an article on Microsoft’s website stated that OpenAI’s tools have the potential to be ‘paradigm-changing’ for security and intelligence agencies and improve their accuracy and efficiency. ‘It’s a powerful tool for analysing satellite photographs and field maps, translating speech and text, offering interpretation, and creating virtual spaces for training,’ the article noted.
Prior to 2024, OpenAI’s terms included a clause prohibiting the use of its services for ‘military and warfare’ activities. But in January 2024, as the Israeli army was ramping up its reliance on GPT-4 while pummeling the Gaza Strip, the company quietly removed this clause from its website and expanded its partnerships with militaries and national intelligence agencies.
In October, OpenAI publicly stated that it would examine cooperation with security agencies in the United States and ‘allied countries,’ believing that ‘democracies should continue to take the lead in AI development, guided by values such as freedom, fairness, and respect for human rights.’ OpenAI also announced that it will cooperate with Anduril, a company that manufactures AI-based drones, while it was reported last year that Microsoft provided its model to the CIA for the analysis of top-secret documents in a closed internal system.
The revelations in these documents correspond with the statements of Col. Racheli Dembinsky, commander of the Israeli army’s Centre of Computing and Information Systems Unit (‘Mamram’), which provides data processing for the whole military. At a conference near Tel Aviv last July, as +972 and Local Call previously revealed, Dembinsky said that the army’s operational capabilities were ‘upgraded’ during the current war in Gaza thanks to the ‘wonderful world of cloud providers’ that enabled ‘very significant operational effectiveness.’
This, Dembinsky said, was thanks to the ‘crazy wealth of services, big data, and AI’ 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.
In her July lecture, Dembinsky explained that the army began working more intensively with the cloud companies due to the demands of the war. With the beginning of the ground invasion of Gaza in late October 2023, the army’s systems were overwhelmed and ‘resources were exhausted.’ This shortage 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 purchase AI tools and computing power ‘without a glass ceiling.’
The leaked documents show that the Israeli military’s average monthly use of Azure’s cloud storage facilities in the first six months of the war was 60 percent higher than in the four months leading up to it.
In August, the IDF Spokesperson emphasised to +972 and Local Call that ‘the IDF’s classified information is not transferred to civilian providers, and remains in the IDF’s segregated networks’ — although our investigation at the time showed that the Israeli army had in fact stored some intelligence information collected via the mass surveillance of Gaza’s population on servers managed by Amazon’s AWS.
This time, Israel’s army and Defence ministry declined to comment.
Harry Davies of The Guardian contributed to this report. This article was first published in +972 Magazine.
