Backed by US funding and Palantirโs AI tools, the IAEA turned its Iran inspections into a surveillance regime that blurred the line between monitoring and military targeting.
Kit Klarenberg, The Cradle, July 2, 2025
Photo Credit: The Cradle
Ever since Israel launched its illegal war of aggression against Iran on 13 June, speculation has swirled around the role played by MOSAIC โ a tool created by shadowy spy-tech firm Palantir.
This software has been deeply embedded within the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) operations, particularly its โsafeguardingโ mission: inspections and monitoring state compliance with non-proliferation agreements.
MOSAIC has been central to this work for a decade and was quietly integrated by former US president Barack Obama’s administration into the July 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal with Iran.
Espionage disguised as oversight
The deal granted IAEA inspectors unfettered access to Iran’s nuclear facilities to confirm the absence of a nuclear weapons program. In the process, the agency accumulated an immense trove of data: surveillance imagery, sensor measurements, facility documents โ all of which were fed into MOSAIC’s predictive system.
Yet the software’s pivotal role in the deal remained concealed until a Bloomberg exposรฉ in May 2018, just days before US President Donald Trump, during his first term, unilaterally tore up the agreement and launched Washington’s so-called โmaximum pressureโ campaign against Tehran.
Despite Trump tearing up the deal, inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities continued, as did MOSAIC’s monitoring of Tehranโs nuclear program. As Bloomberg noted, Palantirโs technology helped the IAEA scrutinize vast swaths of information from disparate sources, including 400 million โdigital objectsโ globally, such as โsocial media feeds and satellite photographs inside Iranโ โ a capability that โraised concern the IAEA may overstep the boundary between nuclear monitoring and intelligence-gathering.”
The Bloomberg piece also provided fodder for an oft-stated Iranian concern that Mosaic was helping Israelis track Iranian scientists for assassination:
“The tool is at the analytical core of the agencyโs new $50 million MOSAIC platform, turning databases of classified information into maps that help inspectors visualize ties between the people, places and material involved in nuclear activities, IAEA documents show.”
Bloomberg quoted the head of a British company that โadvises governments on verification issuesโ on the hazards of false data being fed into MOSAIC, โeither by accident or designโ:
โYou will generate a false return if you add a false assumption into the system without making the appropriate qualifier โฆYouโll end up convincing yourself that shadows are real.โ
The underlying and ongoing concern for Tehran is that MOSAIC is heavily influenced by Palantirโs โpredictive-policing software.โ Employed by many law enforcement agencies across the western world at enormous expense, this technology is highly controversial and has been found to exhibit dangerous, misleading biases, leading to erroneous โpre-crimeโ interventions.
Indeed, MIT Technology Review has flat-out called for the dismantlement of predictive tech in a report that looks at how dangerous the technology has been in analyzing even domestic criminal data:
โLack of transparency and biased training data mean these tools are not fit for purpose. If we canโt fix them, we should ditch them.โ
Given the inclusion of dubious intelligence โ such as the Mossad-stolen Iranian nuclear archive, openly celebrated by the Israeli agency for its deception โ it is highly probable that such corrupted data triggered unjustified inspections. Bloomberg quoted a negotiator who helped craft the 2015 deal, expressing concern over how โdirty or unstructured dataโ could lead to โa flurry of unnecessary snap inspections.โ
Palantirโs software specifically helped the IAEA โplan and justify unscheduled probesโ โ at least 60 of these conducted until US-Israeli strikes put an end to inspections.
Data as a weapon
On 31 May, the IAEA released a report suggesting Iran may still be developing nuclear weapons. Although it presented no new evidence, its dubious charges related โto activities dating back decadesโ at three sites where, purportedly, until the early 2000s, โundeclared nuclear materialโ was handled.
Its findings prompted the UN nuclear watchdog’s Board of Governors to charge Iran as โin breach of its non-proliferation obligationsโ on 12 June, providing Tel Aviv with a propaganda pretext for its illegal attack the next day.
On 17 June, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi conceded that the agency had โno proof of a systematic effort to move into a nuclear weaponโ by Tehran. Still, the damage was done. Iranian lawmakers, citing the IAEA’s secret sharing of sensitive data with Tel Aviv and Grossi’s covert collusion with Israeli officials, suspended all cooperation with the agency.
This may be the wisest course for other states under IAEA scrutiny. MOSAIC is now so entwined with the agency’s daily function that any country targeted for regime change could find itself accused of nuclear ambitions based on manufactured evidence.
A 2017 IAEA document reveals MOSAIC is comprised of โover 20 different software development projects.โ Launched in May 2015, it was hoped to revolutionize โsafeguardingโ the world over.
The report described MOSAIC as providing inspectors with โa suite of tools with which to face the challenges of tomorrow.โ For instance, the Electronic Verification Package (EVP) enables field data โ including planning, reporting, and review โ to be automatically collected and processed. When inspectors visit a facility, they record vast amounts of information โ instantly analyzed at headquarters via EVP.
Elsewhere, the Collaborative Analysis Platform (CAP) enables deep cross-referencing of internal and open-source data, including overhead imagery. It supports the IAEA’s core safeguarding processes: โplanning, information collection and analysis, verification, and evaluation.โ
CAP gives the IAEA โthe capability to search, collect, and integrate multiple data and information sources to enable comprehensive analysis.โ An IAEA official quoted in the document declared the platform represented โa major leap forward in analyticsโ and โa game changerโ, allowing the IAEA to collect โa much greater amount of information, and also analyze that information in greater depth than before.โ
Such analytical capacity grants inspectors โthe ability to establish relationships between information from multiple sources, across time,โ and โmake sense out of huge amounts of data.โ
CAP also assists in the collection and evaluation of open-source information. The document noted the platform could โprocess much more open-source information than the Department currently has capacity for,โ and lets staff โsearch information across the entire repository; carefully cross-check different types of information; and utilize information in visual formats,โ such as โoverhead imagery.โ
โExtra-budgetary contributionsโ from the US government
All of this intelligence is highly sensitive and would be a treasure trove for states intent on military action against nations in the IAEA’s crosshairs. According to the 2017 report, inspectors spent 13,248 days in the field in 2015 and inspected 709 nuclear facilities. Those figures have since grown. All the while, MOSAIC โ a little-known tool for the โearly detection of the misuse of nuclear material or technologyโ โ has remained operational.
The report noted that MOSAIC was financed through the IAEA’s regular budget, the Major Capital Investment Fund, and โextra-budgetary contributions.โ Its cost at the time was around โฌ41 million (approximately $44.15 million) โ almost 10 percent of the agency’s total annual budget. The source and size of those extra-budgetary contributions remain vague, perhaps deliberately, but a Congressional Research Service briefing note indicates Washington formally funds the IAEA to the tune of over $100 million annually.
Moreover, the US consistently provides in excess of $90 million in extra-budgetary contributions every year. In other words, almost half of the IAEAโs budget flows from Stateside, suggesting MOSAIC was created wholly on Washingtonโs dime.
The timing of its rollout โ two months prior to the Obama administrationโs nuclear deal being agreed โ could further indicate it was explicitly funded with Iran in mind. As then-IAEA director general Yukiya Amano revealed in March 2018, the associationโs penetration of Tehran was unprecedented.
At a press conference, Amano referred to the IAEAโs nuclear โverification regimeโ in Iran as โthe worldโs most robust.โ The organizationโs inspectors spent โ3,000 calendar days per year on the groundโ in the country, capturing โhundreds of thousands of images captured daily by our sophisticated surveillance cameras,โ which was โabout half of the total number of such images that we collect throughout the world.โ
In all, โover one million pieces of open source informationโ were collected by the IAEA monthly.
The IAEAโs fixation on Iran, coupled with suspicions that it provided the names of nuclear scientists โ later assassinated by Israel โ raises the question: Was the 2015 deal always an industrial-scale espionage operation designed to prepare for war?
A wave of assassinations of nuclear scientists and IRGC commanders in the early stages of Tel Aviv’s failed war on Iran appears to support that conclusion.
Iranian officials not only suspended cooperation with the IAEA and ordered the dismantlement of inspection cameras, but also rejected Grossiโs request to visit bombed nuclear sites. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi branded the IAEA chief’s insistence on visiting under the pretext of safeguards “meaningless and possibly even malign in intent.”
What is clear is that any state still cooperating with the IAEA must now reckon with the possibility that it is not being monitored โ it is being mapped for war.
Photo Credit: The Cradle
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