Benjamin Netanyahu

Benjamin Netanyahu (born 1949) is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, in office across three stints since 1996. Having branded Israel the “startup nation” and built its reputation as a cyber power, he has spent the AI boom arguing the country must repeat the play at larger scale — or be left behind by nations with vastly more compute, capital and people.

Courting the builders

Netanyahu moved early to align with AI’s leading figures: he hosted Sam Altman in Jerusalem during OpenAI’s June 2023 world tour, and that September held a livestreamed conversation with Elon Musk in California about AI’s promise and risks, musing that it could bring either unlimited abundance or unprecedented disruption. He repeatedly framed AI as a race Israel “cannot afford to lose,” commissioning national expert committees on AI policy.

The national program

In June 2026 his government approved a National AI Program spearheaded by a National AI Directorate in the Prime Minister’s Office — spanning compute infrastructure (a national goal of 100,000 processing units), R&D, talent, and embedding AI across government, with reported costs running to tens of billions of shekels. The push is inseparable from controversy: Israel’s military has been widely reported to use AI-assisted targeting systems in the Gaza war, drawing international criticism that the same national AI prowess Netanyahu celebrates has been applied to lethal operations at scale, and critics at home note the program arrived years after rivals like the UAE and Saudi Arabia had national strategies.