The writer of that post on X was referring to an internet intelligence dashboard following the US-Israel strikes against Iran in real time. Built by two people from the enterprise capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, it combines open-source data like satellite imagery and ship tracking with a chat function, news feeds, and links to prediction markets, where people can bet on things like who Iran’s next “supreme leader” might be (the recent number of Mojtaba Khamenei left some bettors with a payout).
I’ve reviewed over a dozen other dashboards like this within the last week. Many were apparently “vibe-coded” in a few days with the assistance of AI tools, including one which got the eye of a founding father of the intelligence giant Palantir, the platform through which the US military is accessing AI models like Claude through the war. Some were built before the conflict in Iran, but nearly all of them are being advertised by their creators as a approach to beat the slow and ineffective media by getting straight to the reality of what’s happening on the bottom. “Just learned more in 30 seconds watching this map than reading or watching any major news network,” one commenter wrote on LinkedIn, responding to a visualization of Iran’s airspace being shut down before the strikes.
Much of the highlight on AI and the Iran conflict has rightfully been on the role that models like Claude is likely to be playing in helping the US military make decisions about where to strike. But these intelligence dashboards and the ecosystem surrounding them reflect a brand new role that AI is playing in wartime: mediating information, often for the more serious.
There’s a confluence of things at play. AI coding tools mean people don’t need much technical skill to assemble open-source intelligence anymore, and chatbots can offer fast, if dubious, evaluation of it. The rise in fake content leaves observers of the war wanting the type of raw, accurate evaluation normally accessible only to intelligence agencies. Demand for these dashboards can be driven by real-time prediction markets that promise financial rewards to anyone sufficiently informed. And the incontrovertible fact that the US military is using Anthropic’s Claude within the conflict (despite its designation as a supply chain risk) has signaled to observers that AI is the intelligence tool the professionals use. Together, these trends are making a latest sort of AI-enabled wartime circus that may distort the flow of knowledge as much because it clarifies it.
As a journalist, I consider these forms of intelligence tools have a number of promise. While lots of us know that real-time data on shipping routes or power outages exist, it’s a robust thing to really see all of it assembled in a single place (though using it to look at a war unfold when you munch on popcorn and place bets turns the war into perverse entertainment). But there are real reasons to think that these forms of raw data feeds are usually not as informative as they might feel.
Craig Silverman, a digital investigations expert who teaches investigative techniques, has been keeping a log of those dashboards (he’s as much as 20). “The priority,” he says, “is there’s an illusion of being up to the mark and being on top of things, where all you’re really doing is just pulling in a ton of signals and never necessarily understanding what you’re seeing, or with the ability to pull out true insights from it.”
One problem has to do with the standard of the knowledge. Many dashboards feature “intel feeds” with AI-generated summaries of complex, ever-changing news events. These can introduce inaccuracies. By design, the info is just not especially curated. As a substitute, the feeds just display every little thing without delay, with a map of strike locations in Iran next to the costs of obscure cryptocurrencies.
