Brandon J. Weichert
Back in 2015, global surveillance firm Palantir contracted with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an international nuclear watchdog group, to help the IAEA in its mission to monitor Iran’s nuclear weapons development program. At the core of this mission was an artificial intelligence construct codenamed “Mosaic.”
The idea was to have a more foolproof enforcement mechanism for the IAEA’s oversight of the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that was enacted in 2015. Rather than having scores of analysts physically poring over hundreds, if not thousands, of satellite imagery and assessments on targets, like Iran’s various nuclear weapons facilities, the IAEA wanted to streamline the process.
Palantir came forward with a product that would allow them to do just that. The $50 million Mosaic AI-powered software would sift through more than 400 million data points to forecast Iran’s nuclear trajectories.
Originally designed for counterterrorism and intelligence operations, this predictive artificial intelligence system operates not by collecting data points from the targets it is tracking, but instead makes inferences based on data analyses of satellite imagery, trade logs, metadata, and social media posts about the target. It’s a fascinating technology and if there is one company that would absolutely make such a program work, it is Palantir—which, not coincidentally, is also a top contractor of the Central Intelligence Agency.
A variation of the same program has been used by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) in its ongoing counterterrorism campaign against Iranian-backed terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. The Mosaic program was in fact derived from this older system sold to the IDF by Palantir.
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