See an insect crawling in the corner of the room? It might be a surveillance robot, thanks to research at Carnegie Mellon University to develop cockroach-like robots with, and for, the Israeli military.
Robot cockroaches, “terror-network” mapping, and rapid missile guidance are just three examples of at least 70 research projects U.S. universities have conducted on behalf of the Israeli Ministry of Defense (IMoD). Over a thousand pages of internal university and U.S./Israeli military documents reveal a sweeping, decades-long program to sponsor military research collaborations with at least 30 U.S. universities, from Cornell to the University of California at San Diego, since at least 2009.
Projects are conducted in collaboration with the Israeli military and sometimes explicitly incorporate environmental conditions in Palestine into the work. One project designed fuel cells for “distributed sensor networks” tailored to the temperature and soil conditions of an Israeli border that could monitor “potential terrorist activity” for “border security.”
Recent reports from Dropsite News , The Nation , and the Anti-War Initiative found millions of Israeli military dollars flowing into U.S. schools. Public records obtained from 13 U.S. universities reveal this money was directed via a U.S. arms export program to fund collaborations with Israeli scientists and military officials.
These projects are not funded by traditional academic grants. Instead, they are procured as “defense articles and services,” paid for with U.S. taxpayer dollars via the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program – the same mechanism Israel uses to purchase F-35 fighter jets and other U.S. defense exports.
At least 11 contracts sent U.S. scientists to Israel to work face to face with their counterparts at an Israeli university and/or the IMoD, earmarking funds for U.S. professors to attend meetings and present their research to the IMoD.
The research
Though research subjects span the breadth of Israel’s military interests, including drone swarms, missile guidance, fuel cells, and quantum sensing, we highlight just a few threads to illustrate how U.S. universities support Israel’s military.
Alongside robotic cockroaches, Prof. Sarah Bergbreiter built “ inchworm-like ” crawlers with an IMoD scientist at the University of Maryland. Profs. Indejrit Chopra, also at Maryland, and Kenneth Breuer at Brown University were inspired by hummingbirds and bats to develop micro-drones that can search caves and demolished buildings. Columbia Prof. Hod Lipson built the Flexipod , a “soft quadrupedal robot” agile enough to do backflips and navigate varied terrain.
The IDF has used other drones to collect massive surveillance datasets that are fed into AI software to track targets and accelerate “ kill-chains .” Recent Israeli innovations in this area follows years of IMoD-sponsored research at U.S. universities on this kind of technology.
In December 2016, the IDF prototyped an AI tool to “Tell You What’s Happening in a Video,” generating captions to help soldiers “keep an eye on the battlefield.”
The following year, Prof. Kate Saenko received $120,000 from the IMoD for research on “Generating Natural Language Descriptions for Video” using AI to automatically describe and classify people and objects in a video. While sponsored by a second IMoD contract on “Zero Shot Captioning,” or using machine-learning to describe things not seen before, Saenko’s group presented software for the “detection of novel objects” titled “Learning To Detect Every Thing” at a Tel Aviv conference.
According to an ex-IDF intelligence officer, a human eye “will go over [AI-generated] targets before each attack, but it need not spend a lot of time on them.” One IMoD-sponsored project at the University of California, Berkeley could make that process even faster.
Neuroscientist Robert Knight tested electrodes in a brain-computer-interface (BCI) for “cognitive enhancement” of “high throughput tasks requiring visual recognition.” In his internal proposal to the IMoD, but not in his published study , Knight discusses applications like “detecting ‘suspicious’ activity.”
Prof. V.S. Subrahmanian at the University of Maryland received IMoD funding to study “Targeting of Terror Networks” to “find weak points for the destabilization of terrorist networks.” He has applied these algorithms to identify alleged “sympathizers” of Hezbollah on social media.
Another of Subrahmanian's IMoD contracts on “ Massive Social Networks ” involved analyzing “ 1.04 million person-days ” of cellular location data for tracking population flow in Israel and its Occupied Territories. The study notes its algorithms are “related to… monitoring for evading targets by a flock of unmanned air vehicles.”
Other IMoD-sponsored projects studied drone swarms directly.
“Human-Robot Interaction Design for a Single Operator with Many Robots” was the IMoD project of Prof. Holly Yanco , the director of the University of Massachusetts’ Lowell’s Robotics Center. MIT Prof. Emilio Frazzoli devised “trajectory optimization” algorithms for groups of quadrotors, emphasizing his results are “easy to implement and may be used directly.”
Prof. Joaquim Martins at the University of Michigan optimized “package delivery UAV” fleets for the IMoD, given “mission requirements” with “various package weights and delivery distances.” He found that quadrotors are best for “long-range missions with small numbers of customers,” and thanked Israeli arms company Rafael’s CTO of Multi-Domain Warfare for help with “research methodology.” Martins’ published paper only lists civilian applications like delivering “medical supplies” despite its IMoD sponsorship.
This is not the only seeming example of a gap between an IMoD proposal and the published paper that followed it. In 2015, Profs. Alexander Yarin (University of Illinois Chicago) and Eyal Zussman (Technion) submitted a chemical sensing proposal telling the IMoD their “Overall research objective is to develop [a] fundamental understanding of sampling and detect[ing] buried explosives,” elaborating that “the detection of buried improvised explosives and mines [is] a major challenge in the battlefield.”
But a public-facing paper detailing experiments nearly identical to their internal application only listed civilian applications like “mining,” without any references to "explosives" or the "battlefield." The paper did not acknowledge any funding sources, including the IMoD. Neither professor responded to a request for comment.
The funding pipeline
The research is purchased by the IMoD Mission to USA , the Israeli military procurement office that spends roughly $3.3 billion in annual U.S. aid to buy defense goods and services.
As analyst Christian Sorensen of Eisenhower Media Network explained over e-mail: “US taxpayers give money to the US government. The US government then sends billions of dollars to Israel. Israel uses that money – there’s not a strict accounting – to purchase goods and services from US war corporations and research from US academic institutions."
To receive IMoD funds, universities like UC Irvine certified they were “entering into an agreement to sell defense articles … to the foreign government listed above,” and that the payment would be made “under the provisions of the Arms Export Control Act.” The projects are classified as Direct Commercial Contracts (DCCs), or sales from a defense contractor to a foreign military, subsidized by the U.S. government. Because only DCCs of over $100 million to Israel require legislative notification, the program has no public reporting mechanism or granular congressional oversight, and we do not know if any other countries use DCCs to sponsor U.S. science. In an e-mail to the IMoD, one university administrator called this funding arrangement a “departure from standard process.”
For over 35 years, Israel was one of just ten countries authorized to use DCCs, spending over a billion dollars annually on defense exports from private entities such as these research projects. But in April 2026, the Pentagon extended this privilege to over 50 countries.
A bureaucratic carve-out known as the Fundamental Research Exclusion allows the IMoD to bypass export controls for defense research it sponsors if the results are eventually “published and shared broadly.”
Both MIT and the University of California systems censored their funding databases after student activists discovered their schools’ IMoD contracts. In July 2025, an MIT professor canceled a proposed IMoD contract due to public backlash.
A spokesperson for the State Department referred questions about this purchasing arrangement to a fact sheet on U.S.-Israeli Security Cooperation. The sheet notes that the U.S. participates in “a variety of exchanges with Israel,” including research and weapons development.
The Israeli Ministry of Defense declined to comment.
Scientists at 30 US schools have done military research for Israel
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at ResponsibleStatecraft.