Its author Post ONX was referring to an online intelligence dashboard that was in real time following US-Israeli strikes against Iran. Created by two people at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, it combines open-source data like satellite imagery and ship tracking with chat functions, news feeds, and links to prediction markets, where people can bet on things like who will be the next “supreme leader” of Iran (the recent election Mujtaba Khamenei Left some bettors with one payment).
I’ve reviewed more than a dozen other dashboards like this in the past week. Many were apparently “vibecoded” within days with the help of AI tools, including one Got attention From the founder of intelligence giant Palantir, the platform through which the US military is accessing AI models like Claude during war. Some were built before the conflict in Iran, but almost all are being promoted by their creators as a way to defeat the slow and ineffective media by getting to the truth of what is happening on the ground. “Learned more looking at this map in 30 seconds than reading or watching any major news network,” one commenter said. wrote On LinkedIn, a response to the notion of Iran’s airspace being closed before the attacks.
Much of the focus in the AI-Iran conflict has been on the role that cloud-like models are playing in helping the US military. Decisions About where to strike. But these intelligence dashboards and the ecosystems around them reflect a new role that AI is playing in wartime: mediating information, often for the worse.
There is a confluence of factors at play. AI coding tools mean people don’t need much technical expertise to gather open-source intelligence, and chatbots can quickly provide analysis if it’s suspicious. The proliferation of fake material makes war observers want to do the kind of raw, accurate analysis normally accessible only to intelligence agencies. Demand for these dashboards is also driven by real-time prediction markets that promise financial rewards to anyone who provides enough information. And the fact that the US military is using Anthropic’s Claude in the conflict (despite that Position as supply chain risk) has signaled to observers that AI is the intelligence tool that professionals use. Together, these trends are creating a new kind of AI-driven wartime circus that can distort the flow of information as much as it clarifies it.
As a journalist, I believe these types of intelligence tools hold great promise. While many of us know there’s real-time data on shipping routes or power outages, seeing it all gathered in one place is a powerful thing (although using it to watch the battle unfold while you play and place bets on popcorn turns war into perverse entertainment). But there are real reasons to think that such raw data feeds are not as informative as they might seem.
Craig Silverman, a digital forensics expert who teaches investigative techniques, keeps a log of these dashboards (he’s up to 20 years old). “The concern,” he says, “is an illusion of being on top of things and being in control, where you’re really just pulling in a ton of signals and not necessarily understanding what you’re seeing, or being able to draw real insight from it.”
One issue concerns the quality of information. Many dashboards feature “intel feeds” with AI-generated summaries of complex, ever-changing news events. This can introduce errors. By design, data is not specifically generated. Instead, the feds just show everything at once, along with a map of the strike locations along with the prices of obscure cryptocurrencies in Iran.