Maker of AI Targeting System for Drones Faces Protests for Shipments to Israeli Military

A company in Portland, Oregon, that specializes in AI targeting for drones has made significant shipments of materials to military contractors in Israel, according to cargo data reviewed by The Intercept. The shipments raise the possibility thaat a boutique Pacific Northwest tech firm has helped the Israeli military attack people in places like Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, among others.

Sightline Intelligence, a firm focused on AI video processing, has made at least 10 shipments of hardware to the Israeli weapons giant Elbit Systems since 2024, according to investigators with the Movement Research Unit, the group that originally obtained the documents.

The revelation that a local company has been doing business with Israel has led to protests by activists in Portland.

“We really want our city councilors to help us follow up and look into what Sightline is doing,” said Olivia Katbi, a member of Portland Democratic Socialists of America and an organizer with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. “Are they producing these items here in our city? What is their relationship with Elbit Systems in Israel?”

Drones have become a crucial part of Israel’s military strategy, allowing it to mount deadly attacks without endangering its own troops, said Movement Research Unit’s Abdullah F., who asked to omit his last name due to the sensitivity of his work.

“They’ve been connected to the death of many civilians,” he said, “and they’re a critical part also of the surveillance architecture.”

10 Shipments

Researchers with the Movement Research Unit, which gathers information for left-wing organizations and causes, said they pinpointed 10 shipments from Sightline to Elbit Systems in Karmiel, Israel. The Intercept was able to independently verify the dates and corresponding cargo weights of those shipments from Portland to Israel.

Six of the shipments passed through John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and four went through Newark International Airport in New Jersey. (Sightline, its parent company Acron Technologies, and Elbit Systems did not respond to requests for comment.)

Using commercial data drawn from cargo manifests, the researchers found that the shipments included SLA-3000-OEM embedded video processing boards and associated components that are part of a surveillance system that can be used for target recognition.

In marketing materials, the company says the tech can quickly identify people and vehicles on the ground and classify them as civilians, military targets, armed targets, or people willing or unwilling to surrender. It assigns a percentage to the confidence of these classifications.

“Sightline provides an application that allows unmanned vehicles to autonomously classify targets, and these video processing boards are a crucial part of that,” Abdullah said. “They enable low-latency — AKA very fast — video processing so that a drone operator can, in real time, see like, ‘This person is 94 percent unarmed’ or ‘75 percent military.’ And so we can all imagine how decisions might be made based on that algorithm.”

Abdullah declined to detail research techniques for fear that companies could take steps to evade identification of future shipments. Research using these techniques has, however, been borne out in the past. Shipments identified by the group’s methods were confirmed through parliamentary questioning in the United Kingdom and are, in part, the basis for an ongoing court case in Belgium against FedEx for the undeclared transport of weapons components, in both cases with regards to the shipment to Israel of parts for F-35 fighter planes.

Similar methods were also used to expose a shipment of nitrocellulose — an explosive component used in ammunition — from JFK Airport to Israel in May 2025, as first reported by The Intercept and the Irish investigative website The Ditch.

Israeli Targeting

Originally founded in 2007 as Sightline Applications, Sightline Intelligence is based in Portland, with offices in Hood River, Oregon, and Brisbane, Australia. Until Friday, the company was owned by Artemis, a Boston-based private equity firm that announced last week it had sold the company for an undisclosed sum to Acron Technologies.

Sightline specializes in target recognition and touts its low-latency video processing as an essential tool in the modern military arsenal. The firm has not publicized business dealings with Elbit Systems, a prominent target of the global BDS movement. On its website, however, Sightline lists FMS Aerospace — a company that works with weapons contractors in the country — as an “international partner.” FMS Aerospace, in turn, lists Israel’s air force as a partner, along with Elbit Systems and other companies in the Israeli military–industrial complex.

Israel’s use of military drones and commercial quadcopter drones has been documented extensively by journalists and human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch and Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. There is no publicly available information as to whether the hardware or software developed by Sightline Intelligence has seen use in the field by Israeli forces, but a recent photo included in a dossier of information hacked from the phone of a high-ranking general appears to indicate that, at the very least, Israel has tested the technology, Abdullah said.

The photo, published online by the Handala hacking team, an outfit believed to be operating out of Iran, shows Israeli Gen. Herzi Halevi with half a dozen other men in military garb and a laptop screen in view that appears to shows a software user interface that places a map with markings on the left of the screen and informational and toggle displays in a column on the right side. (Abdullah, who pointed The Intercept to the image, cautioned that he could not independently verify it.) The display is similar to the user interface for Sightline targeting program that the company posted online.

“On the laptop you can see what looks very, very similar to Sightline’s geospatial intelligence planning tool,” Abdullah said. “You can see the long blue lines that are on the front of the screen, which appear to match up with the planning tool. You can also see a couple of blue toggles on the side that also seem to match up, and then a goal distance bar in the bottom right of the screen that appears very similar.”

“While we cannot say conclusively that this is the same platform,” he added, “this is highly suggestive of this software being deployed or trialed in an Israeli military environment.”

Portland Protests

In Portland, protesters organizing against Sightline’s business relationship with Israel spoke last week at a City Council meeting and later gathered several dozen people to rally outside the company’s headquarters. (A spokesperson for Portland Mayor Keith Wilson declined to comment.)

One item in particular from Sightline’s promotional materials caught the eye of local activists. The company’s website shows what appears to be a surveillance image taken from above the aerial tram stop at Oregon Health & Science University, a public research university in the city.

The image appeared in a video originally posted online by the company last June. The video, however, has since been updated with several seconds cut to exclude the images of the tram stop.

Katbi, the BDS organizer, said, “I think people will be mad if they find out that this company is potentially training this technology to identify us as civilians here in Portland, without our consent, and then using that technology to kill people in Gaza.”