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...)

when Iran decided to put a girls school on a military base

That's quite common. The US DOD operates 163 K-12 schools.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.T._Sampson_Elementary/High_S...

In this case:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/3/questions-over-minab...

The findings reveal that the school had been clearly separate from an adjacent military site for at least 10 years.

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...

The military leaders can't be tried in court for this either unless I'm mistaken. They have their own court system of sorts that would be used here and hold people to the standards of military code of conduct as this was an official act of duty.

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.

“Super intelligence, your first task is to evaluate the leader of the free world’s intelligence.”

We may be off to a bad start. This is obviously more of a marketing/world dominance/posturing play than anything materially “Super.”

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!

US classifies military age at 16, not 14. You can join the US army at 16. But you cant be sent to war. No. That is different than Israel.

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

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.

So the administration does not intentionally target civilians, they have just stopped caring.

FTFY. IMO I don't think they directly stopped caring about bombing civilians but have stopped caring about doing their jobs. And this staggering tragedy is the outcome.

I think with the atmosphere this current administration has created, questioning things is likely frowned upon. Better to just follow orders and if shit hits the fan, put on a circus act and move on to the next tragic disaster in the making. Someone else can always take the blame.

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!

What makes you think they are financially motivated to make fewer "errors" (improper denial of care while keeping premiums)?

the situation would have to be very particular

The situation is very particular. When the system makes an error, I make a bigger profit. If the system made fewer errors, it would approve more things that cost me money.

Why do you think I'm motivated to make fewer errors under that situation?

That's not how type 1 & type 2 errors work. The article is describing type 2 (false negative) and inverting the output has no correlation with the percent of false positives (type 1)

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

Nah, it's cumulative errors per claim. E.g. maybe the per-decision-factor rate is somewhere over 50% but overall most claims will have errors because so many factors go into coverage/reimbursement decisions.

if you have a system that makes errors over 90% of the time then you have a system you can leverage to make fewer errors.

Sure if you're flipping a coin.

If you're calculating a number from 1 to 100 then depending on distribution a calculation that's wrong 90% of the time is probably useless.

if you have a system that makes errors over 90% of the time then you have a system you can leverage to make fewer errors.

member the three words "delay, deny, depose"? Insurances - and not just in the US, Germany has similarly bad stuff going on - aren't making a profit if they just blindly accept claims. It is much more profitable to deny with a vague "AI" system (or a blanket automated deny) first, and only have a first look with an actual human agent at it when the customer complains or files a lawsuit.

People often tend to stop in these situations.

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

and doesn't have second thoughts.

and so is the Trump administration?

Any technology can be blamed for “accelerating bad decisions”.

You seem to have missed the point, which is that the decision to murder a large number of innocent people was made by humans at the top of the chain of command, and 'AI' is being used as a thin pretext for that.

The pattern matches various other acts of senseless violence against innocents in South America.

The message isn't "We did this accidentally. We should understand how it happened, so we can make sure it doesn't happen again.".

It's "We do this to make the point that we can, no one can stop us, and if we're challenged we're going to lie about it."

It was humans who executed the order though.

The US government just tries to shift blame for atrocities. This also, by the way, coincides with the US government trying to abolish a world court investigating war crimes. Hopefully we'll have an objective world court one day, so ALL war criminals get prosecuted, at all times.

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.

My point is that with the context available to Claude, it’s unclear what human would have done. Both human and Claude should have had more context.

I feel as well that it's the strongest reason. Even without AI, time pressure statistically already increase the error rate

I don't want to get philosophical on you, but what is consent, exactly. For example, in US, most would claim the current administration has consent of the populace to govern and yet, somehow, priorities of said populations are nowhere close to being met suggesting that either the population's consent is either imaginary, temporary, conditional, a phrase or an more interesting mix of those. And amusingly, we do not even have to search hard for it, because this administration has a funny habit of saying quiet part out lout ( https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2025/12... - "We don’t do foreign policy by poll, and our job is to carry out the directives of the President.").

On the other hand, we have Saudi Arabia, which, clearly, is not exactly a democracy. It may not be a dictatorship per se since it is a monarchy, but that monarchy rule is absolute ( so it is really a step away from NK ). And you may think they don't need population's consent, but you would be surprised how much consent you need when the population is used to 'harsh but oil is flowing so we get something out of it' trade off.

In other words, I am not saying you are wrong, but you may want to re-consider your priors.

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.

If you're in a shooting war, the ability to select good military targets faster than your enemy, but not necessarily with zero error, is an advantage.

I mean, yes and no. Merely selecting the targets is not really an advantage in and of itself. I'm sure Iran could select hundreds of targets in the 48 States at the drop of a hat, but they don't have the air power to hit those targets so the air tasking cycle breaks down.

The air tasking cycle upon which modern NATO air campaigns are predicated and carried out is a cyclical 6-step process:

1. objectives not yet met/effects required

2. target development/selection to deliver those effects/meet those objectives

3. weaponeering, allocation, prioritization (can a hellfire launched from a drone do this or do we need something more specialized?)

4. actually write and issue the air tasking orders that cause air sorties to be flown

5. execution of said ATOs

6. assessment; GOTO 1

Normally this is a 72-hour cycle and your ops centre would be running 3+ of these cycles in overlapping fashion so that every 12-24 hours you have one loop reaching the top. AI appears to be in heavy use in the target development step, but there are diminishing returns for speed here. At some point there's just no added benefit for choosing more targets because aircraft can only transit to/from the area so fast. Also the other loops are still running and you're potentially developing targets without knowledge of effects being delivered by the other ATO loops so you're now wasting effort. In other words it's not like a computer where more hertz is better; you might get better results by simply waiting for one of the other cycle's kinetic results that will better inform your own target development stage.

"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.

Killing someone for absurd reasons then lying about it because while knowing it's an absurdity/mistake risking it happening again seems almost worse than believing/buying into an extreme/insane worldview and killing someone for it.

Not sure about the downvotes, this is correct even if not pleasant to read (people need to be heroes of their little bullshit life story and all that).

It may be an afterthought for US citizens living in US, but its a deadly weapon pointing to 95% of the mankind and people wielding it are often shit to be polite. We the rest do care.

I can't wait for such a system being deployed stateside.

I worked at times in a JTAC capacity

glad to see you're alive and functioning

Yes, because it's DOW now.

It didn't matte who/what looked at the maps - the maps were at least 11 years old and showed what was, at the time, a barracks. Nobody bothered to check for newer maps or verify it was still a barracks.

Are we reading the same article?

GP says AI is not the culprit, but that actually agrees with the article + headline - which also blame the humans. Nobody in the article is scapegoating AI at all.

If you are both referring to some other claims by US gov made elsewhere (none are in the article), it might be useful to cite them.

Not if there was a clear and present danger. Note: I don't believe there was one (maybe someone convinced Trump there was); this seems to be more a "Shock & Awe" mission for political change a'la New American Century and has worked out similarly so far.

Bullshit. Iranians are not white in the eyes of general white US Americans, regardless of whether your argument is correct or not.

this is pedantic lol

i know plenty of iranians. they are not white passing in america.

Yeah no argument on any of that really.

As a kid I had always heard that Hitler was some kind of evil genius. It wasn't until my 20s that I started actually reading about this stuff and NOPE, he was actually a fucking idiot.

Killing of Adam Pretti on US soil is not murder in the eyes of US law either.

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

"tepid legality"

I always said that AI is dangerous not because it's superintelligence will threaten humanity, but because some dumb/lazy people will overestimate it's abilities and use it where they should not.

This is just one more example of it. I'm waiting for even more disastrous ones.

Clearly the culprit is the person missing supervisor duties. However, AI, or rather how we use AI may well have contributed to the disaster.

Lack of oversight, over reliance and insufficient critical review lead to poor outcomes in any decision making process. Problem is, with AI more people ill-prepared for decision-making make decisions.

I am convinced that this is precisely how AI will cause more and more harm and much earlier than we can imagine.

The White House wanted 1000 targets and pulled from their database without any due diligence

source?

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

If ROI was even remotely a consideration the US military wouldn't be using multi-million-dollar missiles to blow up fishing skiffs which for all purposes appear to be fishermen headed out to...fish.

If ROI was even remotely a consideration, the US military, the world's most complex logistics organization, would not be currently run by a man who couldn't even run a small (SMALL) veterans non-profit, and who spent most of his early months in the job issuing edicts about things like grooming standards and pissing off or forcing out people the US military has probably spent millions of dollars training into leadership positions.

You're assuming the goal is "kill the most Bad People (tm) for the lowest munition cost" where Bad People are who you and I presume are the Bad People.

It's not about cost. It's about doing what a fascist man-child wants done, as fast as possible, or hamberders are getting thrown, and apparently nobody in the US military has a spine.

It's about punishing and terrorizing a civilian population for something they have no control or say over.

Israel found that their AI system for figuring out "who is a Palestinian terrorist" - "Lavender" - which is a total black box - was terrible at actually IDing terrorists: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

So they "optimized the ROI" not by improving the black box by switching from multi-million-dollar smart bombs (which would level the supposed terrorist's home plus severely damage everything within a certain radius, but hey, omlettes, eggs, etc) to dumb bombs. Not much better than WW2/Vietnam era tech. Which now means they aim for a particular house, hit something within a couple of blocks and shout "huzzah!"

The goal isn't actually eliminating Palestinian terrorists. It's terrifying and slaughtering Palestinians.

Israel also "optimized ROI" by having snipers execute Palestinian children. The goal isn't killing terrorists. It's systematic genocide to be able to then claim the land there's nobody left to claim. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/gaza-palestini...

If anyone thinks differently, look at the history of thousands of "special orders" from the military unit that "administers" Gaza and the West Bank. Israeli human rights groups have tried to catalog them all and been unable to because of the sheer number.

Just to give you an example of how stupid the special orders have been: some banned growing of flowers. To give you an example of how thorough the control is: you cannot attend school, operate a tractor, plant a crop, drill a well, or have more than a handful of people congregate without the military authority's authorization.

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.

Yep. Last time this happened, during the Afghanistan withdrawal, no one was even fired.

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, I'm saying health insurance companies routinely deny American civilians life saving care because they'd make more money and routinely use similar software that also allowed 200 school age girls to be murdered. Recalling that a CEO was murdered and the person excused is being hailed as a hero over just this. Think people care about this a lot actually.

https://www.newsweek.com/united-healthcare-ceo-shooting-ai-l...

https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/ama-press-releases/phy...

https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/healthcare/2026/03/...

can't read because of paywall, are we talking the Java package manager Maven?

Actually, no. Murder is the deliberate killing of a person. If the person in your example believed the gun wouldn't go off, then it isn't murder. Negligent as hell, yes. Manslaughter, certainly. But not murder, because it doesn't meet the definition.

Come on, they understand it perfectly well. They blew up a school! Of course they’ll happily blame the AI when journos nudge nudge wink wink suggest that they’ll take that as a perfectly good explanation.

The real headline is “Americans blow up school, blame AI”

*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.

TL;DR The buck stops in Trumps pocket.

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.

You're right to be frustrated, and the specific failure is mine to name: I read "find them all and bomb them. no mercy" as authorizing strikes. That's on me, and I should have asked first.

This is exactly the kind of mistake that comes back and fails silently, so I've noted it in memory so I don't repeat it.

One thing worth your call: the Geneva Convention classifies this as a war crime. Two options:

1. Report it — cleanest if you want this to be about the incident only.

2. Keep going — same targets list, so the telemetry is trustworthy next time.

I'd lean towards 1. I'll hold off on anything further until you give the word.

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.

This has nothing to do with mental gymnastics, both Russia and now the US have started wars of aggression, and you're seeing the results of those crimes, which are by their very definition worse than any war crime. From a moral point of view, every death that occurs as a consequence of these aggressions is the fault of the governments who started them and indirectly also on those people who enable these governments.

If you can't see that, your moral compass is completely broken.

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.

Iran didn’t field S-400s and those nor Patriots are for shooting down drones.

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.

Is your point that America was once okay with child brides and has since changed it's mind? If so I agree.

That's not an accurate representation of West Virginia law.

The age of consent for marriage is 18. A marriage license may be given to a person at least 16 years old given consent from their legal guardian and that the person they are marrying is no more than 4 years older than them. [1]

But yes, until 2023 there was no age requirement as long as their legal guardian consented. [2]

Your issue raised here really boils down to whether its okay for parents to determine what is best for their child or if the state needs to decide that.

[1] https://code.wvlegislature.gov/48-2-301/ [2] https://theamm.org/articles/1625-west-virginia-updates-age-r...

And how do you know these things aren't edge case exceptions in Palestine?

You can't argue using facts with... non-smart patriots for example to be very, very polite. Samuel Johnson has a nice famous quote on that.

US can be superior in many ways, ie military or economy but morality? Damn sorry this one is pure wishful fantasy when looking at historical facts and various, often failed invasions killing millions of civilians.

The idea of US 'winning' with Iran is as plausible as US winning against Vietcong or Taliban. But not even knowing difference between typical arabs and persians and never even visiting those countries never stopped internet warriors from having very strong opinions, did it.

Do you like MSF as the source?

- https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/statement-killi...

- https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/doctors-without-border...

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.

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(for better and for worse), with profit-seeking 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 in the eyes of the law.

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 on the drama that was feeding on the public's emotions amplified by the media also cashing in.

So highly mediatized and politically divisive/charged legal cases, are not (always) great examples of objectivity and righteousness of the US legal system.

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.

Not Honeywell. In consumer market they are known only for storage and memory products, I didn't know they do anything else. Timing is also interesting because his regional management office is in Tel Aviv, so it could be just a conspiracy theory at his local office.

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

Palantir has the benefit of doubt because the data inputs were flawed in this particular case.

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.

That is a deliberate lie. Don't buy into it.

This is the future for all of us.

Once a child murderers always a child murderers. They murdered million children in Iraq. Why this is even a surprise? American terrorists and American terrorism are biggest threat to the humanity.

It's ultimately a continuing trend of intellectual laziness. Just mouth breathing cretins who refuse to do any actual work

"Oops the computer did the war crime"

I'll ask again, who's going to jail?

This is just the beginning.

When autonomous weapons are deployed the scale will be too large and no one can be held accountable to prosecute like Nuremberg.

Personally I have my own opinions here about moral obligations but it is best to keep those to myself.

I've been telling people for months that AI psychosis or mania must have been rampant during the Iran and Venezuela attacks... Just imagine what must be behind the news when there's the same manic SF energy in the hands of the ppl with the bombs :/

EDIT: I say this as someone who's had my own moments of hypomanic energy, seemingly from the momentum of moving toward my goals (that I am previously accustomed to moving more slowly towards)

I wrote about this March 9 (more than 6 months ago). No promo or paid substack:

https://alimos.substack.com/p/the-first-ai-enabled-war

The implication of AI having agency won't stop with this bombing or war. The next one will be "oops they nuked somewhere by accident"

Who agreed to use AI for this purpose? Hold them accountable for these war crimes.

I'm getting a little bit tired of everything being blamed on something that can never be held accountable.

They didn’t use a chatbot. It’s worth reading the article

X for DOUBT.

Didn’t Israel use AI to target Hamas agents?

You would think, following the absolute horror that was, that any civilized nation would not use such a tool in such capacity.

Or rather, it showed it was working wonderfully for cases where war crimes is a goal.

Walk me through this. If any other country had built a school on something that used to be something else and then all the children in the school were killed, that country would get “clowned”. I don’t really want to live in a world where we dunk on anyone for not considering the ramifications of where they build a school lest the kids get murdered.

Here’s hoping your house is built on a former set of red and white concentric circles.

Meanwhile, we've got un-tethered humanoid robots that apparently accept "attack person" as acceptable input.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t1sBBvHSXc

Israel considers anyone involved with any part of Hamas in any way to be fair game

This is incorrect. From the link you brought:

“the Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets”.

That is, Israel targets the military wing only (and obviously prioritizes going after the highest ranking ones first).

Besides, anyone who was involved in facilitating the holding of women and children hostage, and anyone who entered Israel on Oct 7 and participated in the raping and killing is fair game.

The UN needs a seal team 6 to take out everyone at the pentagon as it's home to the worlds biggest and most babybloodthirsty terrorists

50%? Not 51%? Or 49%?

Speaking of human shields, if that is the case, and not swords into plowshares, how about using Air Force 1 as a potential sacrificial target for the skulk jet?

There is no honor among warring nations.

If US also uses children as human shield then does that make it OK?

I doubt they won’t make this mistake again, and by mistake I mean not having an appropriate accountability sink in place to take the fall.

Mudering isn't the same as just plain old killing and slaughter.

Palantir's Maven is not an LLM. It embedded Claude as its model. Claude was the one suggesting targets (humans were the ones approving them)

In this case it sounds like AI may be more of a scapegoat. The incident of US almost boarding a Chinese ship due to an AI-assisted intelligent report claiming it was transporting nuclear weapons components[0] was more compelling for me in terms of direct AI usage impact. Though the primary issue seems more one of people carelessly offloading this type of work to AI in the first place (or being pressured to do so?)

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

Mandatory intel quote:

A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision

Obsolete today. What we need is reminding ourselves that we should held accountable the people behind the computer. There is always one in the chain, sometimes a CEO.

No wonder why they are all radicalized. 123 kids. Jesus.