The United States is reportedly bringing a powerful new weapon to the Iran war: large artificial intelligence (AI) models tasked with automating every stage of the targeting process, from satellite imagery analysis to final strike selection.

But how these systems operate remains strictly classified, with incidents such as the February bombing of a primary school that killed more than 200 children in southern Iran raising public concerns about AI’s potential role in committing war crimes.

Now China has taken a first step towards transparency.

Chinese aerospace researchers last month unveiled the Air Target Agent System, a powerful LLM agent collaboration AI tool designed to take satellite surveillance beyond image recognition – enabling it to analyse what it sees, draw conclusions and act on them autonomously.

The system combines large language models (LLMs) with AI agents capable of breaking down complex tasks, automatically selecting algorithms, coordinating workflows and recovering from failures without human intervention.