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

one could say these people aren't pulling the trigger, they are part of the trigger, pulled by higher-ups

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

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/10/pentagon-iran-schoo...

The Pentagon chief last year slashed offices that didn’t contribute to his goal of “lethality,” including the group that assists in limiting risk to civilians, known as the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. Around 200 employees who worked on the issue, including at that office, have been reduced by about 90 percent, according to two current and former officials and a person familiar with the effort. The team that handles civilian casualties at Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, has dropped from 10 to one.

Negligent homicide in pursuit of their DEI goals, basically.

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...

Precursor to WW3 is just WW3. When can we admit it's happening?

“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...

No evidence to support this statement has been found.

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...

That’s strategically extremely dumb, unless your goal is to genocide a population.

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.

I can easily build you a system that will guess the price of a stock tomorrow wrong at least 90% of the time. Even 100% wrong if you'd like. How would you use that to make fewer errors in some other system?

People often tend to stop in these situations.

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

No, but the US has historically permitted even cold-blooded torture of innocents with no liability, and has asserted the state secrets privilege to prevent lawsuits and prosecutions, so it wouldn't have mattered.

But that's a US-specific thing. With humans you at least have this theoretical liability-- that there is someone who could be punished.

and doesn't have second thoughts.

and so is the Trump administration?

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

Who decided to bomb places? AI? Who decided to pick a fight? AI?

We had a public tender for some 3d model of a railroad project a few years ago, three companies applied and for some reason (corruption) the most expensive one was selected to make the model.

They blamed excel for the bad choice. Excel.

I mean sure, you can always blame the tool, i can blame my cars rear parking sensors when i hit someone when backing up during parking, but come on... at some point, a human is responsible. Someone, some person, decided and greenlit the decision to bomb those places and should now be in jail for that.

I mean, what's next? A building collapses, because the load bearing sections are too weak... do we blame CAD tools now?

If someone made a table of one hundred potential targets and rolled ten ten sided dice to pick a row to target, do we blame the decisipn on the dice, the table, Wizards of the Coast, or the person who decided this was a good way to choose targets?

You should have just kept the last two sentences.

The decision was indeed made by AI and humans failed in their duty to fucking verify it.

The decision to leave the decision to AI was made by humans. It's on the moronic humans for not understanding the limitations and flaws of the software they are using and believing the marketing material without constantly verifying their results.

How good or bad the software is an almost equally important but separate issue.

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."

FWIW, forcing people to go along with transparent lies is a popular social manoeuvre. It signals both the power of a group and the power of the person leading the lie.

Although it is a very frustrating tendency, because honesty and realism tends to be better for the people who have the numbers. It is hard to organise real efforts around lies.

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.

The whole point of using the AI systems it to review vast amount of data. They would 100% have access to updated pictures if we as civs can pull that data from public sources. Its not like the school was new, it had existed for over 10 years!!

[1]https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yqqyly9n0o

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.

I mean, this site is full of people that develop the weapons used to commit atrocities and genocides (both physical and digital ones) so I am not surprised about the downvotes..

Edward Snowden did.

Reminds me of the lesson in Real Genius [0]. Fun movie.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Genius

If that's what it takes for Americans to start caring about the harm their military is inflicting on the world, sure.

I believe its called the second amendment.

In Rambo 2 (1985) it sort of was.

I worked at times in a JTAC capacity

glad to see you're alive and functioning

The DoW rename (which Congress never approved) happened in 2025. The Department of Defense has had some major lapses in judgement for a long time before that.

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

It's possible that it is, but if someone tried to prosecute it, state secrets privilege would like be invoked, as it has been in similar cases, so prosecutors don't even try.

"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?

No one is going to jail for what is nothing else but a heinous crime against humanity. This is the USA 2026, and it is abhorrent beyond comprehension.

Whether it was an AI call or an SQL query

...or it was just a XLS/Excel sheet sent around by someone by mail

I feel like this actually highlights an undocumented feature of AI that institutions are taking advantage of: the ability to go "The AI fucked up. It happens. What're you gonna do?" I don't see anyone being held responsible and I don't see any plan to prevent this in the future.

I think AI wrote this comment.

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)

For better or worse, health care providers at least in the US are for profit businesses. There's been plenty of arguments made to change that, but as it stands we shouldn't be surprised when a for profit business decides what service they provide and to whom they provide it.

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

The entire point of the post is that it isn't credible that the person actually thought their killing machine couldn't kill: pointing a gun at someone with the intention of killing, and pulling the trigger, counts as murder, even if you thought the person would magically survive if they were innocent.

You're free to try to make a case otherwise, but it'll be an uphill battle against reason.

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.

Military accountability, and government accountability in general, has been and will always be a problem. As long as those in charge make and enforce the rules they will always look out for themselves first.

That's by design.

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

Why western armies specifically? What countries have a history of actually holding their military to legal account for their actions?

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.

Oh I agree, I didn't want to insinuate that war crimes on either side shouldn't be prosecuted, and the question is actually open whether using AI for targeting does not in itself constitute a war crime because it's negligent. I just wanted to challenge the one-sided focus on one incident by Ukraine on it's own occupied territory when in fact it's well-known that Russia has habitually committed war crimes in Ukraine right from the start in 2014. I mean, they shot down a civilian airliner killing 298 people and FSB officer bragged about it on VKontakte. And that's just the start of a long serious of heinous crimes and mass killings.

Unfortunately, it was clear with the success of drone warfare that automated killing by AI was going to be the future and it should have been banned internationally right from the start. They are already using killer robots in Ukraine on both sides, though still rarely.

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.

lol

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.

Would you hold that same line for individuals that built weapons, planes, bombs, etc in past wars?

Companies that make bombs aren't forced to (usually), and they also know there's only really one use for a bomb.

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.

Listen guys, i cannot be held responsible for how an evil government chooses to use my child torture machine, if I didn't make it someone else would have, you cannot blame me, I'm just great at building stuff and trying to put food on the table

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.

You stuck your head in the sand on this one buddy but I'm going to build the safest god-damned child torture machine possible because if I won't some jackass will that gets a child more hurt than they need to, sorry I don't live in your fantasy world of rainbows and sprinkles.

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

Militaries are very rarely held to account for actions taken that end up causing civilian deaths. At the end if the day international law is extremely toothless, and trying to define laws for how war can be fought feels similar to watching the Patriot and wondering why the hell anyone agreed to stand in a line and take turns shooting at each other.

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.

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

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

"Analysis of commercially available satellite images from ... 2018 shows brightly painted walls, soccer fields, assembly rows and play markings."

"Some US analysts took notice as early as 2019 ... logged remarks in a system"

Iranian authorities failed their own people. Again.

Killing children with taxpayer money vs evacuating a school was part of a military base more than 8 years ago. It is clear what government is failing their people, and it isn't Iran in this context.

The US has been doing unanounced bombing in Iran for decades now. However, this was the first one I'm aware of that had such a wide breadth of targets. Afaik, past targets were generally nuclear sites, air defense installations, high level personell. I believe this was only the second time the US has bombed them during active negotiations.

Having a school near or in a military base is not unreasonable. Those that serve on the base often live in or near the base and may have children who should be able to go to school near where they live.

Using a surplus former military building for a school is reasonable too; building new buildings has a cost, and reusing an excess building is good stewardship.

The attacks on Iran began at 9:45 am and the school was first attacked at 11:22 am. It takes time for leadership to understand the situation and issue evacuation orders, and it takes time for evacuation orders to be followed. It seems the onsite school leadership had decided at 11 am to leave, but like I said, it takes time to communicate with parents and have children picked up, etc.

Why is it only Iran who has this duty?

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.

you're being nitpicky. for all intents and purposes, they used something outside of human intelligence and kids died

Yes, I am aware, but when I said "chatbot" I'm referring to LLM in general. I could have been more specific, but I was being pretty emotional as well.

X for DOUBT.

Why wouldn't they? There's been very little repercussions for anyone so far. Apart from the Netherlands bracing itself for sanctions from America because the ICC dared to suggest someone might have done something wrong.

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 has continually justified killing and capturing civilians based on extremely loose affiliation with anything related to Hamas or the government of Gaza.

For example, the Israelis have held a prominent Palestinian doctor / hospital director, Hussam Abu Safiya, under the flimsiest of pretexts. Like doctors in the civil service in many countries, he formally holds a government rank and has a ceremonial uniform that he wears once in a blue moon on formal occasions. Think "surgeon general" in the US. Israel has used this as an excuse to hold him for years now, to subject him to torture, and to brand him a militant. He's a neonatal doctor who ran a hospital, so the idea that he was involved in fighting in any way is absurd on its face.

The idea that Israel only targets the military wing of Hamas is simply not plausible to anyone who has followed the conflict at all. It's insulting to our intelligence.

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

Opinion: AI was set up as the fall guy from day one.

The murders continue and a certain mindset demands a fall guy for everything.

Iran itself was blamed.

This was a criminal activity ultimately in the hands of humans, explaining the extreme sanctions being placed on the ICC.

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.

Deadliest American military targeting error

Also known as mass murder

Seriously, that's one way to sanitize hat happened.

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)

Surely that is just the US asserting themselves to be more belligerent than they are? Just a bluff?

Imagine if China seized a US ship carrying nuclear weapons components. It'd be war immediately, and the US of course knows that the same is true of China.

There's also no basis under international law. China is of course a nuclear weapons state and numerous nuclear weapons states have transported nuclear weapons around the world, with nuclear weapons sharing being a something old and accepted.

One special reason that one would expect China to respond to such an operation by actually going to war immediately is that, if it were a nuclear weapon, with all the details and delivery systems etc., it could be analyzed to see how it reacts to missile defence stuff, which might reveal some unknown weakness that would allow MAD to be ended. So somebody getting themselves access to the core reentry, MIRV and maneuvering stuff would be a reason to attack him right away.

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.

Or any of the other million or so sci-fi stories that predicted this might happen.

Oh, here we go, another entity to blame for failings of judgement.

The real advantage of AI is the fact it can be blamed, absolving any humans of responsibility or repercussions.

Double-tap is part of our doctrine and rules of engagement https://www.military.com/feature/2025/12/08/denial-defiance-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igGYzVDKi2k

Before, it was "dead checking". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_checking

Approximately 49%. We have election results as data for this.

No shit.

What will the ICC have to say about this? ...

Sometimes cars crash, but per car there were only a handful of casualties.

Sometimes airplanes crash and per event there were many casualties, which makes it high profile.

While car crashes are often analyzed amateurishly, and little to no attempt is made in exact accounting of responsibilities, for traffic participants X,Y (or Z) and very seldom in the local road regulator / maintainers. If shared liability can't be proven because no one attempts listing all possible contributors, little to no feedback occurs.

When an airplane crashes, every potential contributing facet results in mandatory changes (perhaps this facet did or did not contribute, but we now realize this facet could have contributed now and hence could contribute to similar situations in the future, constantly improving safety (every 'needless' sharing of liability acts like a warning mechanism for relevant subsystems).

One could argue the road incidents should receive similar treatment, so that even if the bulk of responsibility ends up misplaced by the legal system, it still permits forcing feedback on all involved parties.

I think multimillion dollar missiles hitting a children's school with similar numbers of casualties as an airplane crash deserves the kind of treatment airplanes receive.

If that is the case, then we should treat all parties as potentially sharing liability:

The current administration for disbanding the organization that used to double check the targets.

But also the Iranian regime which re allocated a building on a military compound for housing of all possibilities, children, think of the statutes of Rome forbidding the use of human shields.

But also -and nobody wants to hear this- the international community which sets international law, both international peacetime laws as well as international rules of war: why don't we as an international community require every nation to maintain public signed whitelists of civilian facilities (like children-age schools). Quid pro quo: allegations by any nation A of non-civilian use of whitelisted sites declared purely civilian by nation C should force nation C to allow an international consortium, including nation A to inspect said site, to check its not being used as a human shield.

Perhaps the international community needs to look into the mirror and think how we could prevent these situations in the future given everything we know today, instead of just choosing your favorite scape goat in a specific story...

I believe boring solutions like contestable whitelists could prevent this:

either Iran would have preferred whitelisting the school long in advance according to such international law, but then tolerate inspections which may uncover say military use, or it would have kept the facility secret but under such international law it would have a hard time explaining how a children's school popped up out of nowhere on a targetted site without ever declaring it on the whitelist

I think some of the current leaders believe the US would’ve won Vietnam and Iraq wars if tv/media coverage of it hadn’t existed or been more like ww2. So, I think they were honestly ok with collateral damage.

No one saw slop war coming