Investigation: AIRIS Labs
NOTE: This piece represents excerpts from a longer-form investigation. For the full investigation, available via PDF, is here:
Airis Labs is an Israeli AI facial recognition startup that we have followed since their stealth phase. Their product scrapes massive amounts of video from social media, drones, and CCTV and allows the user to pinpoint the videos in which a particular person appears, even if they are in the background. They promote their product for sale to the homeland security and defense industries. Airis Labs was brought to Rockville, Maryland, by the Maryland-Israel Development Center (MIDC), a 501(c)3 that uses public and private funding to bring companies from Israel to Maryland; these are approximately half healthcare companies and half defense companies, such as Elbit, Elta, and Rafael.
Airis Labs recently promoted the fact that their products have been used in Gaza as well as undoubtedly during the illegal war on Iran. We find the company especially worrying due to the lack of guardrails that exist on social media scraping and the enthusiasm with which they promote their product as being able to turn “every smartphone into a field [intelligence] agent”. This is exemplified best by their slogan, “Be everywhere”. They currently have contracts with the homeland security, law enforcement, and defense agencies of various countries including the U.S., but they are almost certainly actively attempting to sell their products to ICE in addition. Additionally, most of the employees formerly worked at Palantir, the IDF, Israeli intelligence, and other AI surveillance startups.
Product Summary
Airis Labs focuses on the conversion of user-generated content (UGC), i.e. any information posted onto social media, into intelligence information. They ask the site visitor whether they’re “Ready to be everywhere?” The Airis Labs website claims their product turns “everyday footage into a tactical advantage” and that “every media [sic], regardless of its source, becomes an intelligence asset”. They boast their product can perform “pixel-only geolocation without metadata”.
Site images display objects, faces, and items being identified in the background of a video and then connected to other videos with the same information present. Other animations on the website indicate users user can draw geoboxes around areas of interest, which will then display social media videos taken within the area of interest. The animations also demonstrate the ability to perform social media analysis, connecting an individual to various videos and media as well as with other individuals in those videos and related locations.
The “Cumulative Brain” product is the underlying engine. It captures and categorizes sound, video, images, and text and converts it into a searchable format that creates links among various disparate types of media using AI. A Ynet article from 15 October 2024 notes that Airis Labs was identified as a civilian company with capabilities for “analyzing, inferring, and extracting information from video”. In addition to analyzing casualties, Airis Labs’ product was used to analyze “the vast amount of information brought by the IDF from the Gaza Strip”.
Customers
Airis Labs, per LinkedIn, works with “defense and homeland security agencies worldwide”. Airis Labs as of 2023 provided services to the IDF.
SAM.gov at time of writing lists no contracts with the U.S. Government. Due to the secretive nature of the business in stealth mode and of defense contracting, it has proven difficult to find the exact customers. However, Airis Labs’ inclusion in the Oracle defense ecosystem indicates they are providing services to agencies within the U.S. Government and likely those of allied nations. Friedman disclosed to the Times of Israel that the company participated in the U.S. Army accelerator program “to integrate new technologies. Lahav has done demonstrations of the product for the National Real Time Crime Center Association in Atlanta, demonstrating how the company “is helping” law enforcement.
The Polish group Payload were able to secure documents indicating Airis Labs were catering their services to the Polish security establishment. The full powerpoint presentation acquired by Payload is available in the full report above.
Analysis
Airis Labs represents a terrifying development in the surveillance industry. The company’s boasting of indiscriminate intelligence collection, even from videos posted by minors, from anyone with a smartphone, should raise extreme concerns over privacy and access to data. Put aside the fact that AI facial, sound, and object recognition are often faulty. This still leaves a mass of data in the hands of an unaccountable corporation hailing from and serving an apartheid state which is actively committing a genocide. In the best case for Airis Labs, in which their product is highly reliable, any person who appears on any video in social media—even in the background—can be identified positively and incorrectly linked to whatever the customer deems to be suspicious. This reduces even further the spaces left in modern society where one can be allowed to experience any privacy and greatly increases the State’s ability to surveil people without consent or prior notification.
We assess based on Airis Labs’ own assertions that ICE is a likely future if not already current customer for Airis Labs. The company’s promotional material, slideshows, and social media posting all indicate a desire to work with the homeland security field generally. ICE already deploys various facial recognition services procured from third parties and has used it in the field to add Americans exercising their First Amendment rights to a domestic terrorism database. Beyond facial recognition alone, ICE is also acquiring iris scanners. It is highly plausible that ICE could deploy Airis Labs’ product to identify protesters at events, bystanders at arrests, and likely next targets for deportation using various features such as geofencing, object recognition, social chain analysis, and other capabilities.
An especially disgusting talking point at Airis Labs relates to the equation of apartheid Israel’s situation with that of Ukraine during the ongoing Russian invasion. Friedman claims that “everything at Airis was built during a war and from a war zone", and Lahav has presented alongside Ukrainian representatives at conferences. There is no similarity between an apartheid state that has committed an enduring genocide and annexation for nearly 80 years and a country that is suffering from an illegal invasion with the goal of annexation. Ukraine certainly needs all the allies it can get in order to stand up to Russia, but comparing its situation to that of apartheid Israel is offensive when it more closely mirrors Russia.
Israeli companies, like the apartheid state they represent, pose a threat not only to Palestinians and Arabs, but also to every country and its citizens. They test morally and ethically dubious products on Palestinians and Gazans using the money they receive from the U.S. and then sell the technology back to the U.S. for it to use on its own people. These are not faceless organizations; they are made up of people and are supported by other people who can be pressured to stop. The cycle can and must be broken.
