Claude helped select targets for Iran strikes, possibly including school

"A Computer Can Never Be Held Accountable Therefore a Computer Must Never Make a Management Decision"

> Anthropic were very vocal, well before this happened, that they were against the use case.

> I don't blame them. These use cases are like blaming MySQL for storing the lat/long of the school. AI can't be held accountable and the company was trying to protect us and, yes, it was too late.

They weren't trying to protect squat, and were not against this use case. Their only two red lines are "no mass domestic surveillance" and "no fully autonomous killing until the AI gets good enough to be able to do it". Assuming the story is true, there's no chance this was a fully autonomous act and was most certainly approved and executed by people.

> These use cases are like blaming MySQL for storing the lat/long of the school.

A storage layer versus a decision making system? What a ridiculous comparison.

When you have a hammer as big as an LLM a lot of problems start to look like nails.

Volume vs accuracy

"Maybe we break a couple eggs making this omelette!"

It's basically an OSINT query tool.

One possibility would be: when I look at the current administration, it's a bunch of bros that don't really know anything except how to succeed between other bros they spend time with, so they need Claude for anything that involves actually knowing something. It's a stretch because you would hope the army is not run by morons, but I would no longer bet that they didn't do this because Hegseth asked Claude and influenced the decision after discussing it over Signal with other bros. The culture is driven by the person in charge, who is also incompetent for anything that doesn't involve dealing with loans and still making out ok despite the bankruptcy.

The modern right wing is all in on AI tools, in part because of their particular beliefs about the nature of expertise and general humanity.

We’ve seen AI tools used for tons and tons of inappropriate things over the last year. Reviewing research grants, aid programs, and regulations? Why not? Publishing propaganda on Twitter? Sure thing! Finding “fraud” in state benefits? Absolutely!

There’s a belief amongst these people that AI tools are better than human judgement and represent an inevitable future where CEO kings operate the world. Why not also apply it to war?

Because it is being sold to government by cronies.

Unfortunately, WaPo has lost credibility for this type of reporting

> The people who pushed the button to launch the missiles that hit the school, and the people who ordered them to do that, are fully responsible here, not the tools they used.

Absolutely. A real issue here is the normalizing of "AI scapegoating".

The real failure? Not following through on human verification of a "strong lead".

The Iran school site absolutely was _once_ a target, in the distant past - it's sited on and within a former Iranian Guard post with airstrip, etc.

The part that needed strong checking was "history since last identified as a target" - and that site has a history of disrepair and abandonment.

The debatable issue was whether the larger site did indeed store significant military assets underground, etc. which was entirely possible.

Didn't read the articles, but at least the planners know and understand a map.

SO... a map is static reference. A calculator is deterministic computation. An LLM is probabilistic generation

In high-stakes environments like military planning, tools that generate new claims rather than reference known data introduce a different class of risk.

Yes, everyone is responsible for their own decisions. But then circle back to risk. How can the planners be sure they aren't dealing with hallucinations, questionable data, differing outputs based on prompts, and a long list of other things...

> Claude banned from use in the Pentagon a few days ago

Not exactly, you might want to reread the news to understand what's actually happening.

Technology isn't intrinsically good or evil. It's how it's used. Like the Death Ray.

Standard Hacker News is heavily "moderated" these days (if not by the mods themselves then by mobocracies misusing tools), which means that anything that falls outside the Happy Silicon Valley / Everything Is Good / Nothing Is Wrong narrative will get flagged and buried.

As a result, sadly, it's become basically a Reddit style echo chamber, where negative news is suppressed. Often, the justification is "it's politics!", as perhaps might be the case here. Despite the fact that Silicon Valley's products, and Silicon Valley itself, are becoming more entangled with "politics" and the US government than ever.

There are better tools than Reddit to see what gets swept under the moderation rug, at least.

That must be one of the most biased analyses on Iran I have read.

Based on the US State Department cables that Wikileaks released all the way back in 2010, Russian fear of NATO expansion into Ukraine was not just a talking point.

Internal State Department cables from the embassy in Moscow say that entire Russian security and political establishment viewed it as a critical national security threat.

In particular, take a look at this cable: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW265_a.html. Here's an excerpt:

> Ukraine and Georgia's NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.

There are warnings throughout the cable that Russia may decide to invade Ukraine over the issue of NATO enlargement. In other words, the claim that this is just a Russian talking point is itself just a talking point.

It wasn't

Anthropic will have a lot of explanations to do. I'm serious, Claude's self-image is clearly going to be affected by this.