To understand how Iran built its digital and AI infrastructure, one must first understand why. 

 The Islamic Republic frames knowledge development as a sacred duty and technology as an instrument of control. In this framing, the state does not simply develop and adopt technology but conscripts it into service.

The Islamic Republic did not simply develop and adopt technology; it conscripted it.

The late Supreme Leader, Khamenei, created the doctrine of jehad-e elmi, or “knowledge jihad,” that elevated scientific development to a religious obligation, framing technological self-sufficiency not as a policy preference but as a civilizational duty.

In his epistemology, “in every era, a different kind of jihad is required. We have military jihad, we have knowledge jihad, we have research jihad. If you are active in the field of jihad, you will defeat the enemy.”

In this vision, those who produce knowledge become mujahideen or fighters engaged in jihad—understood here not as violent struggle but as strenuous striving in the path of God—and the laboratories in which knowledge is produced become a battlefield. 

What makes Iran’s case unique is not merely the use of authoritarian technology, but the depth of the ideological architecture behind it. For four decades, a coherent doctrine has directed the accumulation of technical capacity toward simultaneous goals: projecting power outward and inward, controlling information, monitoring and restricting citizen access to technology, and crushing dissent.

From Ideology to Infrastructure

Against that backdrop, Iran has consistently prioritized centralization of technology and knowledge over distribution. The development of Iran’s national intranet is a clear manifestation of the state’s centralization. 

The system was developed to allow the state to decouple Iranian digital space from the global internet.

Iran’s National Information Network (known by its Persian acronym SHOMA) is the country’s state-controlled intranet, formalized in the 2011–16 development plan. It was built to give the government a self-sufficient domestic network, capable of sustaining essential services such as banking and state-approved platforms while cutting off access to the global internet entirely.

The state developed extensive surveillance and censorship capabilities as foundational components of the country’s internet infrastructure.

The state expanded its control over citizens through AI-powered monitoring tools, including facial recognition deployed for hijab enforcement and systems that tracked and scored citizen behavior to extend the state’s reach further into everyday life.

Over one million women received automated text warnings that their cars risked seizure after surveillance cameras caught them without a headscarf. A United Nations fact-finding report further documented the use of aerial drones to monitor women in public, facial recognition systems at university gates to flag those without hijabs, and a state-backed app that crowdsourced enforcement by enabling ordinary citizens to submit a vehicle’s plate number and whereabouts to authorities.

The Revolutionary Guard Corps played a central institutional role in this build-out, embedding military and security priorities directly into knowledge and technological advancement. Universities have been purged and reoriented to serve ideological and strategic objectives.

In 2009, a consortium tied to the IRGC took a controlling stake (51% of its shares) in the Telecommunications Company of Iran. It is the operator through which all domestic internet traffic passes. This gave the Guards effective ownership of the country’s core communications infrastructure, enabling them to shut down internet access for the entire population by simply instructing service providers to comply.

Since 2014, the IRGC has advanced its cyber capabilities. A dedicated Cyber Defense Command is tasked with surveilling citizens’ online activity, prosecuting dissent, and countering what the regime defines as threats to its cultural and revolutionary values.

 Within it sits the Center for Investigating Organized Cybercrimes, a unit known informally as the “cyber army” that was founded in 2007. The cyber army has conducted coordinated campaigns to identify and arrest activists and website administrators. The Command also works alongside universities, intelligence ministries, and companies linked to hacking, embedding cyber repression into a broader institutional network.

The concept of “knowledge jihad” has provided the theological cover for what is, in practice, the subordination of the intellectual class to revolutionary loyalists. The project aimed to develop infrastructure and expertise that enable both domestic surveillance and external power projection, such as drone programs, cyber operations, and technical assistance flowing to Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

Iran’s experience demonstrates an experiment in developing digital and AI infrastructure without accountability, rather than toward it.

The Strategic Fragility of Centralized Control

 “A system optimized for control is brittle in ways that a system optimized for resilience is not… A system designed to suppress dissent cannot tolerate the kind of internal criticism and error-reporting that would allow it to spot weaknesses.”

The results are instructive. A system optimized for control is brittle in ways that a system optimised for resilience is not. Centralized architecture, designed to give the state a kill switch over digital life, also creates single points of failure.

The most striking illustration of this failure was the traffic camera network that the regime had built to monitor protesters and dissidents, but that was hacked and used by Israeli intelligence. It became the instrument through which the state’s own leadership was tracked, profiled, and ultimately killed, including the Supreme Leader who coined the doctrine of knowledge jihad.

This example demonstrates that centralized technological architecture, built on opacity rather than accountability, accumulates distortions it cannot see or correct until it is turned against itself. A system designed to suppress dissent cannot tolerate the kind of internal criticism and error-reporting that would allow it to spot weaknesses.

Where a democratic system with accountability mechanisms would have forced a response, an authoritarian one silences the warning.

Iran’s experience also demonstrates that a knowledge sector conscripted to serve the state produces strong technical capacity in strategic niches while generating systemic dysfunction in the broader innovation ecosystem. Iran has world-class drone engineers and a crippled civilian tech sector. It has sophisticated filtering algorithms, and the population has become expert at circumventing them.

The escalation between Iran and its proxies on one side and Israel and the United States on the other has exposed the gap between the regime’s technological narrative and its actual strategic position. Nonetheless, Iran’s destructive capability—its missile arsenal, its drone program, and its capacity to threaten regional stability—remains largely intact.

However, the distance between ambition and delivery, between the doctrine of knowledge jihad and the infrastructure it actually produced, is evident. The moral architecture of that doctrine is now deployed to justify political consequences that the material infrastructure could not prevent.

Implications for the Future of Democracy

For democracies now making foundational AI infrastructure choices, Iran is a case study in the divergence between authoritarian and democratic design principles and why that divergence matters structurally, not just ethically. The question is not simply whether digital and AI infrastructure is used for good or ill. It is what the infrastructure is built to do. 

Democratic AI infrastructure, if it is to be resilient rather than brittle, requires design principles that select:

a) distribution over centralisation

b) accountability

c) citizen access

Such a design does not allow a single authority to capture the infrastructure. 

Accountability by design is mandatory: transparency mechanisms, audit rights, and algorithmic contestability must be built into systems from the outset rather than bolted on under pressure. Citizen access must not be treated as a concession, but as a core feature that empowers citizens. It also generates distributed innovation and error correction that state-controlled systems suppress. 

Iran’s knowledge jihad offers the counter-model: a technological infrastructure designed not to empower but to convert the digital environment into an instrument of public repression. It produced real capability built toward control, but also found fragility.

 “The principles embedded in digital and AI infrastructure are not decorative; they determine what the infrastructure can and cannot do over time.”

The deeper lesson for democratic policymakers is that the principles embedded in digital and AI infrastructure are not decorative; they determine what the infrastructure can and cannot do over time. A system built against accountability cannot, by its own logic, become accountable later on.