Transparency & methodology
WW3 Tracker (ww3tracker.co) is an independent, automated conflict documentation site tracking ongoing global military conflicts — primarily the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-Iran-US conflict in the Middle East, along with any nations drawn into those theaters.
The site updates three times daily — at 06:00, 12:00, and 18:00 UTC. Each update pulls the latest reporting from wire services, analytical publications, and open-source intelligence sources, structures it using AI, and publishes it to this site automatically.
This is not a news outlet. We do not have reporters in the field. We do not editorialize, take sides, or amplify unverified claims without attribution. Our goal is to be a single, reliable place where anyone can understand the state of global conflict on any given day.
Three times daily, an automated script fetches the latest conflict-related headlines from NewsAPI (aggregating Reuters, AP, BBC, and dozens of outlets) plus RSS feeds from Bellingcat, ISW, War on the Rocks, Radio Free Europe, and Al Jazeera.
The headlines are passed to Claude (Anthropic's AI) with a detailed prompt instructing it to extract structured data — strikes, casualties, quotes, financial indicators, observer activity — and assign a source credibility tier to each item. Claude does not invent information; it only structures what appears in the source material.
Each day's three updates accumulate rather than overwrite. New strikes, quotes, and log entries are merged into the day's record. The escalation score and financial figures update to reflect the latest assessment.
At the end of each day, a complete JSON snapshot is saved permanently. The full historical archive is browsable at ww3tracker.co/archive.html. No day is ever deleted or overwritten.
Each morning at 06:00 UTC, Claude drafts a newsletter summarizing the previous day's events, which is distributed to subscribers via Beehiiv.
Every strike report, casualty figure, and update log entry is tagged with one of three source tiers:
The Global Escalation Index is a 1–10 score assessed by Claude each update based on the day's reported events. It is not a predictive model — it reflects the current observable state of conflict intensity.
1–3 Low: Diplomatic tensions, sanctions, rhetoric. No active military exchanges.
4–5 Guarded: Sporadic strikes, proxy activity, no direct superpower confrontation.
6–7 Elevated: Active multi-front conflict, direct state-on-state strikes, carrier deployments.
8–9 High: Superpower direct involvement, nuclear rhetoric, mass mobilization.
10 Critical: Imminent or active use of weapons of mass destruction.
The score carries inherent uncertainty and should be understood as one input among many, not a definitive assessment.
We are not affiliated with any government, military, intelligence agency, political party, or advocacy organization. We do not accept advertising. We do not receive government funding. We do not have a political agenda.
We are one person with an interest in keeping an accurate public record of a historic moment, using automation to do at scale what would otherwise be impossible manually.
If you identify a factual error, please reach out. The archive is a permanent record — we do not retroactively alter historical entries, but we will note corrections prominently.
This site costs almost nothing to run and is provided free to anyone who finds it useful. If you'd like to support it: buymeacoffee.com/wartracker