According to +972 magazine, Vole has significantly deepened its involvement in Israel’s military infrastructure, flogging its cloud and artificial intelligence services to the Israeli army since the onset of its operations in Gaza.
Numerous units within the Israeli military, spanning air, ground, and naval forces, have recently used Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure. Among them is the elite intelligence unit, Unit 8200. Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI has granted the military extensive access to the GPT-4 language model, powering ChatGPT.
A collaborative investigation by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and The Guardian, partially based on documents obtained by Drop Site News illustrates how the Israeli military has increased its reliance on civilian tech giants since 7 October. We have already reported how the IDF was also leaning on Google , even while their employees were worried that they might be implicated in war crimes.
Among the army units using Azure's services is the Air Force’s Ofek Unit, responsible for managing comprehensive databases of potential targets for airstrikes, known as the “target bank.”
Other units include the Matspen Unit, which develops operational and combat support systems, and the Sapir Unit, tasked with maintaining the ICT infrastructure for the Military Intelligence Directorate.
Even the Military Advocate General’s Corps, which prosecutes Palestinians and lawbreaking soldiers in the occupied territories, is using these services.
The revelations in these documents correspond with the statements of Col. Racheli Dembinsky, commander of the Israeli army’s Center of Computing and Information Systems Unit (“Mamram”), which provides data processing for the whole military. At a conference near Tel Aviv, 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.”
Dembinsky said this 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.
One Volish employee said: “The potential misuse of our technology weighs heavily on my conscience.” The discontent among Microsoft’s workforce is palpable, with rising anxiety over technology’s role in military operations.
Microsoft’s official stance emphasises compliance with local laws and regulations, but the escalating internal and external criticisms accentuate the moral ambiguities. Critics argue that the company should reevaluate its commercial alliances, especially those with significant military implications.
Besides employee concerns, legal experts are also weighing in, suggesting that such collaborations could expose Microsoft to international legal challenges, mainly if the technology is used in ways that violate international law.