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This week, with big developments in two antitrust cases against Google, we discuss how the company may be forced to change its business. Then we’re joined by the journalist Mark Yarm to discuss his recent visit to an underwater home for his article about techno-utopians who want to colonize the ocean. And finally, it’s tool time! We’ll tell you about our latest experiments with ChatGPT’s o3, Casey’s newest journaling practice and Kevin’s continued battle to get to inbox zero.

Tickets to Hard Fork live are on sale! See us June 24 at SFJAZZ.

Guest:

• Mark Yarm, an executive editor at PCMag and the author of “Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge.”

Additional Reading:

Credits

“Hard Fork” is hosted by Kevin Roose and Casey Newton and produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. This episode was edited by Matt Collette. Engineering by Alyssa Moxley and original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Sophia Lanman and Rowan Niemisto. Fact-checking by Ena Alvarado. Our executive producer is Jen Poyant.

Special thanks to Paula Szuchman, Pui-Wing Tam, Dahlia Haddad and Jeffrey Miranda.

In late 2023, Israel was aiming to assassinate Ibrahim Biari, a top Hamas commander in the northern Gaza Strip who had helped plan the Oct. 7 massacres. But Israeli intelligence could not find Mr. Biari, who they believed was hidden in the network of tunnels underneath Gaza.

So Israeli officers turned to a new military technology infused with artificial intelligence, three Israeli and American officials briefed on the events said. The technology was developed a decade earlier but had not been used in battle. Finding Mr. Biari provided new incentive to improve the tool, so engineers in Israel’s Unit 8200, the country’s equivalent of the National Security Agency, soon integrated A.I. into it, the people said.

Shortly thereafter, Israel listened to Mr. Biari’s calls and tested the A.I. audio tool, which gave an approximate location for where he was making his calls. Using that information, Israel ordered airstrikes to target the area on Oct. 31, 2023, killing Mr. Biari. More than 125 civilians also died in the attack, according to Airwars, a London-based conflict monitor.

The audio tool was just one example of how Israel has used the war in Gaza to rapidly test and deploy A.I.-backed military technologies to a degree that had not been seen before, according to interviews with nine American and Israeli defense officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the work is confidential.

In the past 18 months, Israel has also combined A.I. with facial recognition software to match partly obscured or injured faces to real identities, turned to A.I. to compile potential airstrike targets, and created an Arabic-language A.I. model to power a chatbot that could scan and analyze text messages, social media posts and other Arabic-language data, two people with knowledge of the programs said.

Many of these efforts were a partnership between enlisted soldiers in Unit 8200 and reserve soldiers who work at tech companies such as Google, Microsoft and Meta, three people with knowledge of the technologies said. Unit 8200 set up what became known as “The Studio,” an innovation hub and place to match experts with A.I. projects, the people said.

Yet even as Israel raced to develop the A.I. arsenal, deployment of the technologies sometimes led to mistaken identifications and arrests, as well as civilian deaths, the Israeli and American officials said. Some officials have struggled with the ethical implications of the A.I. tools, which could result in increased surveillance and other civilian killings.

No other nation has been as active as Israel in experimenting with A.I. tools in real-time battles, European and American defense officials said, giving a preview of how such technologies may be used in future wars — and how they might also go awry.

“The urgent need to cope with the crisis accelerated innovation, much of it A.I.-powered,” said Hadas Lorber, the head of the Institute for Applied Research in Responsible A.I. at Israel’s Holon Institute of Technology and a former senior director at the Israeli National Security Council. “It led to game-changing technologies on the battlefield and advantages that proved critical in combat.”

But the technologies “also raise serious ethical questions,” Ms. Lorber said. She warned that A.I. needs checks and balances, adding that humans should make the final decisions.

A spokeswoman for Israel’s military said she could not comment on specific technologies because of their “confidential nature.” Israel “is committed to the lawful and responsible use of data technology tools,” she said, adding that the military was investigating the strike on Mr. Biari and was “unable to provide any further information until the investigation is complete.”

Meta and Microsoft declined to comment. Google said it has “employees who do reserve duty in various countries around the world. The work those employees do as reservists is not connected to Google.”

Israel previously used conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon to experiment with and advance tech tools for its military, such as drones, phone hacking tools and the Iron Dome defense system, which can help intercept short-range ballistic missiles.

After Hamas launched cross-border attacks into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing more than 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages, A.I. technologies were quickly cleared for deployment, four Israeli officials said. That led to the cooperation between Unit 8200 and reserve soldiers in “The Studio” to swiftly develop new A.I. capabilities, they said.

Avi Hasson, the chief executive of Startup Nation Central, an Israeli nonprofit that connects investors with companies, said reservists from Meta, Google and Microsoft had become crucial in driving innovation in drones and data integration.

“Reservists brought know-how and access to key technologies that weren’t available in the military,” he said.

Israel’s military soon used A.I. to enhance its drone fleet. Aviv Shapira, founder and chief executive of XTEND, a software and drone company that works with the Israeli military, said A.I.-powered algorithms were used to build drones to lock on and track targets from a distance.

“In the past, homing capabilities relied on zeroing in on to an image of the target,” he said. “Now A.I. can recognize and track the object itself — may it be a moving car, or a person — with deadly precision.”

Mr. Shapira said his main clients, the Israeli military and the U.S. Department of Defense, were aware of A.I.’s ethical implications in warfare and discussed responsible use of the technology.

One tool developed by “The Studio” was an Arabic-language A.I. model known as a large language model, three Israeli officers familiar with the program said. (The large language model was earlier reported by Plus 972, an Israeli-Palestinian news site.)

Developers previously struggled to create such a model because of a dearth of Arabic-language data to train the technology. When such data was available, it was mostly in standard written Arabic, which is more formal than the dozens of dialects used in spoken Arabic.

The Israeli military did not have that problem, the three officers said. The country had decades of intercepted text messages, transcribed phone calls and posts scraped from social media in spoken Arabic dialects. So Israeli officers created the large language model in the first few months of the war and built a chatbot to run queries in Arabic. They merged the tool with multimedia databases, allowing analysts to run complex searches across images and videos, four Israeli officials said.

When Israel assassinated the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in September, the chatbot analyzed the responses across the Arabic-speaking world, three Israeli officers said. The technology differentiated among different dialects in Lebanon to gauge public reaction, helping Israel to assess if there was public pressure for a counterstrike.

At times, the chatbot could not identify some modern slang terms and words that were transliterated from English to Arabic, two officers said. That required Israeli intelligence officers with expertise in different dialects to review and correct its work, one of the officers said.

The chatbot also sometimes provided wrong answers — for instance, returning photos of pipes instead of guns — two Israeli intelligence officers said. Even so, the A.I. tool significantly accelerated research and analysis, they said.

At temporary checkpoints set up between the northern and southern Gaza Strip, Israel also began equipping cameras after the Oct. 7 attacks with the ability to scan and send high-resolution images of Palestinians to an A.I.-backed facial recognition program.

This system, too, sometimes had trouble identifying people whose faces were obscured. That led to arrests and interrogations of Palestinians who were mistakenly flagged by the facial recognition system, two Israeli intelligence officers said.

Israel also used A.I. to sift through data amassed by intelligence officials on Hamas members. Before the war, Israel built a machine-learning algorithm — code-named “Lavender” — that could quickly sort data to hunt for low-level militants. It was trained on a database of confirmed Hamas members and meant to predict who else might be part of the group. Though the system’s predictions were imperfect, Israel used it at the start of the war in Gaza to help choose attack targets.

Few goals loomed larger than finding and eliminating Hamas’s senior leadership. Near the top of the list was Mr. Biari, the Hamas commander who Israeli officials believed played a central role in planning the Oct. 7 attacks.

Israel’s military intelligence quickly intercepted Mr. Biari’s calls with other Hamas members but could not pinpoint his location. So they turned to the A.I.-backed audio tool, which analyzed different sounds, such as sonic bombs and airstrikes.

After deducing an approximate location for where Mr. Biari was placing his calls, Israeli military officials were warned that the area, which included several apartment complexes, was densely populated, two intelligence officers said. An airstrike would need to target several buildings to ensure Mr. Biari was assassinated, they said. The operation was greenlit.

Since then, Israeli intelligence has also used the audio tool alongside maps and photos of Gaza’s underground tunnel maze to locate hostages. Over time, the tool was refined to more precisely find individuals, two Israeli officers said.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s personal phone number, the one used in a recent Signal chat, was easily accessible on the internet and public apps as recently as March, potentially exposing national security secrets to foreign adversaries.

The phone number could be found in a variety of places, including WhatsApp, Facebook and a fantasy sports site. It was the same number through which the defense secretary, using the Signal commercial messaging app, disclosed flight data for American strikes on the Houthi militia in Yemen.

Cybersecurity analysts said an American defense secretary’s communications device would usually be among the most protected national security assets.

“There’s zero percent chance that someone hasn’t tried to install Pegasus or some other spyware on his phone,” Mike Casey, the former director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said in an interview. “He is one of the top five, probably, most targeted people in the world for espionage.”

Emily Harding, a defense and security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, added: “You just don’t want the secretary of defense’s phone number to be out there and available to anyone.”

The chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, did not respond to request for comment.

Mr. Hegseth’s use of Signal to convey details of military strikes in Yemen first surfaced last month when the editor of The Atlantic wrote an article that said he had been added, apparently accidentally, to an encrypted chat among senior U.S. government officials. The New York Times reported this week that Mr. Hegseth included sensitive information about the strikes in a Signal group chat he set up that included his wife and brother, among others.

Soon after the first Signal chat about Yemen became public in March, Der Spiegel, the German news publication, found the phone numbers of Mr. Hegseth and other senior Trump officials on the internet.

That Mr. Hegseth’s private cellphone number was easily available through commercial providers of contact information is not surprising, security experts said. After all, Mr. Hegseth was a private citizen until Donald J. Trump, who was then the president-elect, announced that he wanted the former National Guardsman and Fox News weekend anchor to run the Pentagon, an $849 billion-a-year enterprise with close to three million employees.

It has now become routine for government officials to keep their personal cellphones when they enter office, several defense and security officials said in interviews. But they are not supposed to use them for official business, as Mr. Hegseth did.

Even low-level government workers are instructed not to use their personal cellphones and laptops for work-related matters, according to current and former government officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.

For senior national security officials, the directive is even more crucial, one former senior Pentagon official said.

Mr. Hegseth had a significant social media presence, a WhatsApp profile and a Facebook page, which he still has.

On Aug. 15, 2024, he used his personal phone number to join Sleeper.com, a fantasy football and sports betting site, using the username “PeteHegseth.” Less than two weeks later, a phone number associated with his wife, Jennifer, also joined the site. She was included in one of the two Signal chats about the strikes.

Mr. Hegseth also left other digital breadcrumbs, using his phone to register for Airbnb and Microsoft Teams, a video and communications program.

Mr. Hegseth’s number is also linked to an email address that is in turn linked to a Google Maps profile. Mr. Hegseth’s reviews on Google Maps include endorsements of a dentist (“The staff is amazing”), a plumber (“Fast, honest, and quality work”), a mural painter (“Painted 2 beautiful flags for us — spot on”) and other businesses. (Google Maps street view blurs out Mr. Hegseth’s former home.)

“If you use your phone for just ordinary daily activities, you are leaving a highly, highly visible digital pathway that even a moderately sophisticated person, let alone a nefarious actor, can follow,” said Glenn S. Gerstell, a former general counsel for the National Security Agency.

Government cellphones, by contrast, are far more secure because they are fitted with rigorous government controls meant to protect official communications.

In using that same phone number on Signal to discuss the exact times that American fighter pilots would take off for strikes in Yemen and other sensitive matters, Mr. Hegseth opened himself — and, potentially the pilots — to foreign adversaries who have demonstrated their abilities to hack into accounts of American officials, encrypted or not, security experts said.

“Phone numbers are like the street address that tell you what house to break into,” said James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert. “Once you get the street address, you get to the house, and there might be locks on the doors, and you ask yourself, ‘Do I have the tools to bypass or break the locks?’”

China and Russia do, and Iran may as well, several cybersecurity experts said.

Last year a series of revelations showed how a sophisticated Chinese intelligence group, called Salt Typhoon, penetrated deep into at least nine U.S. telecommunications firms. Investigators said that among the targets were the commercial, unencrypted phone lines used by Mr. Trump, Vice President JD Vance and top national security officials.

Mr. Gerstell said he had no knowledge of Mr. Hegseth’s phone or if it was subject to attack. But personal phones are typically far more vulnerable than government-issued phones.

“It would be possible, with moderate difficulty for someone to take over a phone in a surreptitious way once they had the number assuming you clicked on something malicious,” Mr. Gerstell said. “And when really sophisticated bad guys are involved, like Russia or China, phones can be infected even if you don’t click on anything.”

Cybersecurity experts said that more than 75 countries had acquired commercial spyware within the past decade. The most sophisticated spyware tools — like Pegasus — have “zero-click” technology, meaning they can stealthily and remotely extract everything from a target’s mobile phone, without the user having to click on a malicious link to give Pegasus remote access. They can turn the mobile phone into a tracking and secret recording device, allowing the phone to spy on its owner.

Signal is an encrypted app, and its security for a commercial messaging service is considered very good. But malware that installed a key logger or keystroke capture code on a phone would allow the hacker, or nation state, to read what someone types into a phone, even in an encrypted app, former officials said.

In the case of Mr. Hegseth’s use of Signal to discuss the Yemen strike plans, spyware on his phone could potentially see what he was typing or reading before he hit “send,” because Signal is encrypted during the moments of sending and receiving, cybersecurity experts said.

One person familiar with the Signal conversation said that Mr. Hegseth’s aides warned him a day or two before the Yemen strikes on March 15 not to discuss such sensitive operational details in his group chat. That chat, while encrypted, was not considered as secure as government channels.

It was unclear how Mr. Hegseth responded to those warnings.

Mr. Hegseth also had Signal set up on a computer in his office at the Pentagon so that he could send and receive instant messages in a space where personal cellphones are not permitted, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. He has two computers in his office, one for personal use and one that is government-issued, one of the people with knowledge of the matter said.

“I guarantee you Russia and China are all over the secretary of defense’s cellphone,” Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, who has suggested that Mr. Hegseth should be fired, told CNN this week.

Christiaan Triebert reported from New York. Greg Jaffe in Washington contributed reporting and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.