Computer Says Kill: Collapsing the Chain w/ with Matt Mahmoudi
How does a country wage war using LLMs? Oh and WHY?
In Computer Says Kill Ep #1 we are joined by Matt Mahmoudi. The US Department of War is leaning heavily on AI technologies to attack Iran. Matt explains how the use of LLMs to identify ‘legitimate targets’ is collapsing the chain of decisions that lead to lethal force. We discuss what this means at a time when fascist governments are eager to demonstrate their strength on the global stage. From Israel field-testing AI weapons in Gaza, to the US using AI tools in horrifying new ways to perpetuate ever worse war crimes, we start to connect the dots between the technology, the people powering it, and the human costs.
Further reading & resources:
- Automated Apartheid — Amnesty International 2023
- How Israel uses facial-recognition systems in Gaza and beyond — Matt’s interview in The Guardian about the report
- Crimes of Dispassion: Autonomous Weapons and the Moral Challenge of Systematic Killing — Elke Schwartz, 2023
- Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted? — By Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz, The New York Times, April 2026
- “Big Brother” in Jerusalem’s Old City — Who Profits Research Centre
- What is Israel's secretive cyber warfare unit 8200? — Reuters 2024
- Genocide as Colonial Erasure — Francesca Albanese, October 2024
- Buy Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence, edited by Mizue Aizeki, Matt Mahmoudi, and Coline Schupfer
- Buy The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World by Anthony Loewesnstein
- can we add
- Francesa Albanese report
- Matt’s research (Automated Apartheid, and anything else on warfare to link to?)
- Palestine Laboratory
**Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!**
Computer Says Maybe is produced by Georgia Iacovou, Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Sarah Myles, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout
