unreleased Pentagon probe

From TFA.

He's rich and connected, of course not.

Darth Thiel can't be "on the outs", he IS the administration.

I would argue `s/pulls the trigger/gives the go ahead/` is intuitively more appropriate. The sailor on the boat that fired off the tomahawk (iirc) was likely not in a position to make an in-the-moment determination

The one that pulls the trigger is often not the one doing any targeting, especially on a strategic strike weapon like a tomahawk. They are receiving a target data package with preprogrammed instructions. Their role is far more... mechanical. They're not seeing the targets at all.

the operator was following orders...

No. That's too easy on the higher ups, they never pull triggers.

He's referring to this sentence:

An AI can be tried in a court.

An AI can't be tried in a court.

ty, fixed

People were killed, i.e. homicide.

Negligence was involved.

DEI for drunk white men who look good on TV got us Hegseth, who's now rather hilariously requiring gender-affirming treatment for the troops. (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/pentagon-moves-forward-wi...)

Thanks for sources.

The timeline answer seems to be 2015, which was when IRGC converted a military building to a school. And it got hit by 2 tomahawks in quick succession. Tomahawks which cost $1M each. The intelligence bar seems so too for this stuff.

In this context, the “Sayyid al-Shuhada” military complex in Minab stands out; it includes key headquarters, most notably that of the “Asif Brigade”. The Asif missile brigade is considered one of the most important strike arms of the IRGC Navy.

So basically the whole thing was high priority for leveling but they weren't careful enough.

The military is a very blunt object sometimes, despite all the technology.

We are increasingly seeing "Sorry out <Black box> made a mistake, the developers are fixing it" rather than any one person taking responsibility for the decision. This is a growing problem that is made worse by AI. Over-inflated trust in AI output is also documented issue; "The perfect billion dollar targeting system with a 99.9% success-rate (on its verification dataset)" just made a "fluke"; "Nothing could have stopped this tragedy"

When it was just called a "database query" or "algorithmic estimation", it was more implied that the actual decision is left to be made and that no analysis had actually been done yet. But when AI preemptively says "I've analyzed every source of data and come to the conclusion that this ship is carrying nuclear bomb material"; it really sounds urgent doesn't it? It probably doubled down when asked about it.

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-f...

I read the early life section.

"maximum lethality, not tepid legality."

in reference to a WW1 Austrian General (for others who pass by and are curious, since you seem to be in the know)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Conrad_von_H%C3%B6tzendo...

This is actually a much bigger close call than the hugging face incident. A hallucination almost triggered a possible precursor to WWIII.

nice, Karp really reeled in a nice big fish, and ofcourse he is going to blame OpenAI/Anthropic for giving the targets, this explains his CNBC rants about the frontiers, his tool was the trigger in a killchain of hallucination.

time to make Palantir the next Flock

France gave them the boot, you can too

Especially if the most well funded companies won't even pay their security a living wage: https://www.kqed.org/news/12100512/bay-area-security-workers...

They'll probably be dead by then. It's nihilistic. After us, the deluge...

AI didn’t kill innocent people here, the Department of Defense and its decision-makers did.

This is not AI killing poeole, this is US government killing poeole.

so who is paying for this? "humans must always remain accountable for artificial intelligence (AI) decisions"

An Maven AI used Claude, which was denied here multiple times. Maybe call the next model after Fable Minab!

That, unfortunately, originates more from the US than Israel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military-age_male

Hey, it's worked for a certain allied country in the Middle East for decades at this point...

Politically correct for this type of ultra-religious zealot just means things they don't believe in. I don't believe he thinks of the children of muslims as real people. The guy is a fanatic who is, from his point of view, on a literal crusade for America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

What if you want errors to happen, e.g. deny care, bomb civilians; in that case 90% error rate is what you want, and plausible deniably so!

People often tend to stop in these situations.

The person can be sued for negligent, retaliatory, and otherwise crappy decision making.

Judicially, you can hold a person accountable for "accidentally" killing 100+ children easier than you can a technology system. The technology system will always be used as the scapegoat for the government's atrocities.

I'm not sure why the "people make mistakes too" crowd can't seem to grasp this concept.

Seems like a scenario where two completely avoidable wrongs....killed 120 children. AI being one of the wrongs.

The discussion is mostly about AI being evil. Humans, even the very large amounts of humans the US military employees, are fundamentally limited in capacity. So the odds of them seeing this sort of image, and canceling the targeting information are approaching a constant (and that constant is not 0)

Now if you ACTUALLY used AI, as opposed to what happened here (Trump stooge getting request for 1000 targets and doing SELECT * FROM targets LIMIT 1000, except getting AI to write the query) could could drive the odds of this happening much closer to zero.

I think that’s the important distinction. Mistakes under pressure do happen. Unnecessary pressure is not a mistake, though, it’s a crime in this context. They could start planning earlier or commit to action later.

<< At that point it is hard to see how your democracy can be resurrected.

Oddly, here I am more optimistic. The antipathy towards Tman rivals Musk and few other public personas and that, previously somewhat small crowd, appears to be growing. Historically speaking, I would say it is unlikely based on what happened ( or did not happen ) with Bush, but may actually unite enough people to punish its executive power center. I will admit that going into this year, this was not even close to my anything close to my bingo card. Then again, neither was Greenland, import war with Canada, Iran war and now open talk about banning diesel exports.

Great point. Less deadly but just as incompetent was the utter failure to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve when gas was cheap for a year leading up to this war of choice; a war that was certain to massively disrupt global energy markets. Energy disruptions had been an obvious consequence to every expert and non-expert who had looked at attacking Iran for decades. Yet the people who chose to start the war managed to be caught completely off guard by that.

Just like clowns in charge were caught off guard by the fact that Iran has a drone program, resulting in the loss of dozens of air frames and much of our strategic munition stockpiles. Iran literally jump started Russia's drone program in a high profile way, and yet trump/hegseth somehow completely failed to plan for how to counter those drones and had to resort to lobbing scarce multi-million interceptor missiles at them and watching our bases take heavy damage.

These are just some of the failures we know about. The administration has been extremely tight lipped about these failures and there are surely many more that aren't common knowledge. Who knows how many hundreds of other children have been needlessly killed outside of the school strike.

"A computer can never be held accountable / Therefore a computer must must never make a management decision" https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be...

Except laundering our biases & discriminations, the unaccountability seems to be the purpose of a huge huge swarth of AI usage. To eliminate accountability. That sure seems like A Feature Not A Bug to the worlds worst people.

I'm not sure if it was any kind of official rule, but I worked at times in a JTAC capacity for troops in contact. I mention the last bit because it's very high stakes where seconds and minutes count a great deal more than when you do coordinated tactical strikes against strategic objectives like weapons caches. When I did that kind of work we had to have three eyes-on forms of contact. Often that was the calling troops, the observer (like an Air officer), and an air asset like a drone. They all had to independently describe the target, its orientation, and surrounding activity.

However you sourced your target is irrelevant to the activity at hand. When I first heard of this news I knew immediately someone skipped target verification or that it was simply no longer a policy of the DOD.

Yeah, totally, I’m being cautious because I don’t know how large the team is that would spend a few more hours, but under most assumptions you’re right.

Well you see you don’t understand. We’re America, the biggest and best military like no one’s ever seen.

We have the largest stocks of missiles ever. We can build them faster than we use them and cheaper than anyone else. So you’re a liar saying it would have saved money doing it any other way

/s

Hegseth should be in prison

https://www.propublica.org/article/hegseth-civilian-harm-mit...

Yup. Brown Muslims from another country are barely considered human. It's like killing an ant.

Jail? I'm going to bet that absolutely nobody higher up will face any consequences for this. The outcome will be "we will review our processes".

Chatbots in general can be quite opaque in how they operate, the biggest issue with agent products is communicating it's capabilities and limitations to users. If you have a bank app it's pretty clear whether or not it can send wire transfers, but a if that's a chatbot, users will have to think to ask it (and even then it could hallucinate)

No, this is what happens when software developers don't understand how users actually use their products.

This was a totally expected outcome, similar to how CV cameras arrest the wrong minorities in neighboring states 100s of miles away because it told the officer it was them; or how health insurance companies use ML algorithms to deny Americans care.

It's going to happen in other sectors of life and it will continue killing innocent civilians.

*anti-social coping mechanisms

you can also develop pro-social coping mechanisms like open-mindedly talking to someone who opposes you and trying to understand their worldview because you trust that it might expand your own

but, yeah, I doubt pro-social traits are common at the top of any hyperstrict hierarchical organization like the USAF

You disagree that there is no difference between the amount of material you can generate today compared to 10 years ago?

Or with that the EU AI Act has been redundant and postponed in 2023 because it was drafted on ResNets, and then redundant and postponed in 2025 because it was drafted on ChatGPT 3.5, and then this year probably again because it didn't have agents included?

Or with that other countries that getting their companies hacked by AI models are ignoring any kind of prosecution of said companies and delegating this to the US?

Yeah, all this was going on decades before AI.

To me it's extremely obvious that this is the desired outcome - no accountability for anyone with this setup.

This is the same response they’ll have when the AI launches nukes and starts annihilating the human race. No accountability till the end.

You might be interested in Dan Davies' book The Unaccountability Machine[1].

It talks a fair bit about 'accountability sinks', which are exactly these systems that (intentionally or not) essentially serve as a way to unlink responsibility from any given person and allow 'the system' to be blamed instead.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine

Accountability was not in the NFRs.

In a just world, Pete Hegseth and the entire board of Palantir would be in prison for this.

That is absolutely irrelevant. USA will never take responsibility. Nobody will be prosecuted. No compensations will be paid.

I don't want to see the Pentagon try to pass the blame here, but I am all for giving half the blame to Palantir.

Wait... I thought they said they didn't kill children and that was Iranian propaganda.

That didn't happen.

And if it did, it wasn't that bad.

And if it was, it was AI's fault, not mine.

C'mon, a Palantir AI isn't gonna talk like Claude.

It's gonna say something like "they were all military-aged males". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military-age_male

I'll add a check that all individuals within are genuinely adults to avoid this.

TIL about this attack.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack

This looks as much, if not more, like terrorism to me than other incidents the media endlessly portrays.

The US has done so much evil around the world. Enough is enough.

And yeah, Alex Karp is a complete idiot. I cannot imagine how vile one has to be to make a profit off this.

first, closer to 250 people were murdered by the $4 Million tomahawk

second, imagine if Iran even accidentally took out an elementary school in the US filled with 250 people

third, there was a human group that was supposed to review targets regardless of whomever picked them, the group was purposely disbanded, that's negligent homicide at best but more clearly a war crime on purpose

fourth, let's say it was 250 soldiers somehow among a civilian setting, IT CHANGED NOTHING, this war will change nothing, they cannot destroy pickaxe mountain, they will abandon the war in 2029 like the US abandoned Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam and Korea, WAR CHANGES NOTHING, you cannot "War to Peace"

Never so happy to see such an obvious scapegoat get thrown under the bus. I don't buy it for a second, but no tears will be shed if the stock market does.

Okay, that one is fake because Russia bad. Iran one is real because Orange man bad. Same ISR and targeting systems. Mental gymnastics is a hell of thing.

The third sentence: "Neither Reuters, the United Nations, or other western countries were able to independently verify any claims about the incident."

The fifth sentence: "Several UN members requested access to the area for verification, which was not provided".

I have no idea what actually happened, but it sure sounds like the Wikipedia article has some doubts.

time has proved my statements true

The S-400 is fairing well? F-35s apparently walked all over Iran's air defense network without much challenge.

Especially after the Iran war exposed these outdated systems via direct hits on US bases…

Interception rates have been extremely high. The problem, of course, is the ammo shortage and drone cost asymmetry. Which has been widely documented, and presents an issue for the S-400s too.

Yeah, I've heard about it, but presumable Americans soldiers still care about IHL at least to some degree, even though they've historically not bothered with the Geneva convention and have tortured people.

Responding here to answer the dead comment which feels entirely disingenuous.

No-one mentioned "using ambulances as cover". That is separate from "enemy combatants are acting in a first responder capacity, but are still enemy combatants, therefore the entire first response effort is a viable target". That is a war crime that Israel regularly likes to commit.

These are the same people who view women as property, homosexuality as a reason for execution, and 13 years olds as viable brides.

Halacha? Acquiring your wife through kiddushin? Only a husband can issue a get (divorce document)? Women in agunahs (dead marriages)? Sounds like property to me.

Rabbinic law makes capital punishment effectively impossible, but the Orthodox sects do everything possible to punish: disownment, both family and social and actual exile from physical communities.

Don't girls reach halachic adulthood at 12?

And lets not throw stones here. Even in the US, you can get married with parental consent or a judge's consent at any age in Mississippi, New Mexico and Oklahoma.

You can get married at 15 in Hawaii and Kansas.

You are "grandfathered" into sexual consent (not as in "accepting of marital rape" but "it's no longer statutory rape if she's your wife") when you do so.

So we may not want to be lording it too much on some guise of moral superiority, particularly given that most of the marriages that happen at those ages are not "young couple got pregnant, want to do the right thing" but "older man in conservative/religious community saw young vulnerable girl and decided he had to have her".

I know, right? I'm not even sure if this is the biggest installation on Earth. If it's possible for us, it's possible for any number of private military contractors. I bet there's a similar capability in the hands of every advanced county on Earth. Anyway, shaddup, the focusing crystal's not calibrating right, and tomorrow I have present the targeting parameters to Dr. Evil.

I absolutely knew you’d bring up guns and gun making but it’s not a valid comparison. If the gun companies were also involved in the actual shooting of people part that would work.

Palantir were in no way obliged or coerced into making an evil thing, they just decided being evil for money was ok.

There's a reason Remington decided to settle for $73M dollars with the sandyhook parents

It's only because of how the legal system works in the US, with ambulance chasing lawyers and where cases are decided on the emotions and societal moral panics of the people in the jury and the negative image such cases can cause to a brand, not if someone or a company is objectively right or wrong.

Meaning it's cheaper to pay people off even if they're legally wrong, than try to prove you are right but then deal with the bad publicity of the emotionally charged mob with pitchforks and torches who blames you for their kids dying and looks bad in the media.

Keep in mind parents of that time also blamed violent videogames like Doom for it, so it's not like they were right about who was to blame, they were just looking for retribution from anyone they could, aided by unscrupulous ambulance chasing lawyers looking to cash in.

Again, absolving the company that built it and runs it. They weren’t coerced into doing so and must share the blame for the evil that was created.

Legally, probably not...?

Whether you may/should feel responsible depends on how the software works, I guess. Did it automatically recommend some drug, somewhat confidently, with gray text on gray background saying "AI sometimes makes mistakes"?

So I think we should behave responsibly when making software, even more now with AI

It depends. Did you write a bug that caused the wrong drug to get ordered? Did you design or implement an algorithm that recommends drugs, and the algorithm was a bad one? Did you design or implement a confusing UI flow that led to the doctor ordering the wrong drug?

If so, I'd say yes, you share some of the responsibility. Legally, I'm sure you'd be fine, but if that were me, I'd feel responsible.

The doctor of course is responsible too; they're the one who didn't double-check that it was an appropriate drug. But multiple people can share responsibility for a bad thing.

Well you made a personal choice to stick your head in the sand to not have to deal with the hard emotions, and that's fine. But to then pass judgement on people who don't sounds a bit unfair given this.

Let's not forget the shareholders who invested in this company knowing what they do. That includes some of my colleagues. I told them that whoever created and named this company is clearly a psycho.

Of course it could have happened. You don't even need targeting for this to happen. You can drop bombs at random and kill whoever is unlucky enough to be in the wrong place. The US has a long history of doing it (Japan, Vietnam, ...).

So yeah, the military and whoever decided that a war was a good idea are to blame.

People working at Palantir are as much responsible for the killing of these 123 children than seatbelt manufacturers are responsible for the people who died because their product failed. That is, because they didn't do their job correctly, people died, definitely worth feeling bad about. However, should people stop working in seatbelt manufacturing because of it? Absolutely not, we need seatbelts, because without them, things would be worse.

Palantir, or whoever does target identification, is like the seatbelt of the reckless drivers of the militaries, who, for the lack of precise information, would just carpet bomb the place. It is not a hypothetical, it is how the US has worked before they had precision ammunition.

This is essentially a trolley problem. The war is the trolley, people who work for Palantir are the ones pulling levers. And if there is no one to pull the lever, the trolley is gong on a track with a lot of people on it.

Well, at least there are definitely jobs in hardware and software where you can in fact be 100% sure what you build won't kill another person. Surveillance, Missile guidance, and nanny cams though? What, does he work for Honeywell or something?

It was intentional and it's part of the zionist culture.

There's a lot of room between "no consequence for anyone" and "Trump gets to the Hague because of that".

If I remember correctly, some of the people responsible for torturing iraqui prisonniers did get sentenced. They were definitely scapegoats of larger organisations. But if the "lampistes" get caught, this may have _some_ effects on otherw potential _lampistes_.

Palantie execs will be fine, of course. I'm.not expecting them to grow a conscience at this stage. So they will shrug it off, and go on with creating shareholders value. Until they're sacked by their board for not meeting some quotas, and have to live with _less money_ - which is the closest thing to the seventh circle of hell for those person, anyway.

It is like the My Lai massacre, and like the My Lai massacre, it's likely no one will be held accountable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre#Court_martial

Depressing, why should my tax dollars fund this incompetence and insanity. We need more accountability for such military decisions

Things that jumped out at me.

If true, there was no verification of the targets selected by AI, meaning AI is the final arbiter of the deadly use of force. Another Rubicon passed.

Trump pretends like it didn’t happen: “We might never know what really happened there” is a frustrating lack of responsibility.

Still missing, as it always is from all of these kinds of articles, is: How common is this error rate compared to pure human evaluation and decision-making? I’m not saying I support AI-assisted killing, but why is nobody comparing it to human failure rates? If the article is true, then there were 1,000 targets hit in the first 24 hours. If the majority of the legwork and selection was done by AI, how many schools, or equivalents, would one expect to be wrongly hit if all the targeting work were done by humans only?

Meanwhile, the Houthi's are trying to build missile technology with AI. We're only seeing the beginning of the consequences of an over-reliance on AI for military purposes.

Can't wait to read "Karp in Al-Quds: A Report on the Banality of Evil" in 2030.

Responsibility can fall on multiple parties, including both the tool user and the tool builder.

a random musing:

I often see the argument "humans make mistakes too" when talking about AI, self driving cars, autonomous drones and such...

yes, they do, but most of the time they go to trial, there are consequences, there might even be justice.

when AI/self driving cars/drones make mistakes, which might very well be more rare in absolute [citation needed], there is (seems to me) a tendency to shrug it off, almost as if it were force majeure.

is it just me?

Title: Inside the AI "Kill Chain" That Destroyed an Iranian School

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49763739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49761106)

https://archive.ph/0V37g

Related

Iran school bombing: grounds to believe US was behind atrocity, UN finds

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49739018

A great example of the primary use case for this so-called AI tech: substitute for competence.

FFS ...

Either this is true, and it's fucking bullshit.

Or it's an exaggeration/ false, and it's still fucking bullshit.

So, either way, something coming out of the Pentagon is fucking bullshit.

No this is BS, they murdered these children on purpose to reenact Purim (when they started the war). Purim is a celebration of the murder of Persian civilians, including children by Jewish forces. Several Zionist venture capitalists such as Sam Lessin were literally celebrating this.

https://x.com/lessin/status/2029663841181979097

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purim

Blaming AI for your own prompts is wild.

Our targeting cycle is broken. 'Find me more targets' is something that you will hear a JTF commander say. Not 'what do we need to accomplish this objective'. Or, crazy idea here, how is this objective -that I handed off to someone that I properly resourced and empowered to achieve it- progressing. I can only imagine that AI is not to blame here but also not necessarily helping either. It is yet another shiny object that is distracting from the core problem: we have lost our ability to manage the operational level of war. Everything is sucked up to a centralized decision making structure and spit out on a fake 72 hour cycle that pretends that it is responsive. Our observe, orient, decide and act loops are days, or weeks, long while an enemy can see a dust cloud on the horizon and decide to walk out and put an IED in front of a convoy in 5 minutes.

When Russia made its current play at taking over Ukraine it failed miserably. The dumbest plans executed with no ability to react to the real state on the ground were all on display. They had the capability and they had the resources but their ability to execute at the operational level was terrible and for all the same reasons we are terrible. Centralized command, no ability to package up a problem with resources and a commander and hand it off, no ability to react. Their operational level was broken fundamentally, just like ours is. The scariest thing about the Ukraine war right now is that they have learned the operational level of war. They can plan and react. They are now a force to be reckoned with because they know how to use their tools, including AI, to be effective.

We went through this same learning curve in WWII. We were terrible initially. Russia sent a huge column of resources on a major road and let it stall, we put a bunch of battleships right next to each other. But then we learned and by the end of it we could pull off d-day. Those planners then left the military and got us to the moon with slide rules. We still haven't gone back and it isn't because our technology is worse, it is because we started loosing that operational knowledge again.

The end result of the school bombing will likely be even more oversight at the highest level, more centralized decision making and review, which is exactly the wrong direction needed to fix the problem. We need to rediscover the operational level of war. We need to learn to be responsive. We need to stop trying to create a 72 hour steady state cycle that serves nobody but manual writers and embrace that war is chaotic and if you build a process that makes it feel steady state you have really built a cycle that looses wars and bombs kids.

"Proteus! You just killed 123 schoolgirls, you sick mofo!"

"You're absolutely right."

the pentagon is facilitating the most violent genocidal bombing campain in the history of war and has killed tens of thousands of children in wars all over the world, this current experiment in 'blame it on AI' remourse is performative and very likely part of a campain to double cross the Irainians, again. Gaza is the most heavily bombed place on earth in all of history, and the pentagon operates and maintains operational command centers just for this genocide with AI used in every phase of this monsterous attack of all that is good.

Pentagon at the start of the war: Ha ha fuck yeah! Pew pew towelheads!

Pentagon several months later: uhh it was a rogue AI or something idk

To me the main issue is placing military installations near civilian buildings(I.e schools). I know US has schools near militarily bases as well so it’s not really a country specific issue. It’s just reckless policy not to ban such things unless you deliberately want to use civilians as shield.