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Comment by m3h | Hacker News Reader

Someone who until yesterday did not seem bothered by his technology being possibly used to bomb elementary girls school in another country seems to suddenly care about the repression of citizens in yet another country.

No, we don't buy your virtue signaling. And we certainly don't need your better-than-thou opinions on this year's "nightmare scenarios".

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> Someone who until yesterday did not seem bothered by his technology being possibly used to bomb elementary girls school in another country...

I might have missed something but wasn't the big story that Dario refused the Department of War's demand to use Anthropic's models for such purposes?

No. He refused the use against US citizens domestically. He had already agreed for military use against others - this is well reported.

Anthropic's ToS restricts the DoW from using their models for 1. Fully autonomous weapons systems, and 2. Mass domestic surveillance. There is no carve-out regarding who the autonomous weapons systems would be used against.

What does "Fully autonomous" mean? If someone presses a single button to authorize an autonomous drone to enter a theatre and conduct autonomous strikes for 4 hours without any further approval is it truely "fully autonomous?"

Yes. A munition that hangs around waiting for targets and decides whether it should attack without checking with a human. That’s a fully autonomous weapon.

No. The moment there is a human involved, it is obviously not fully autonomous

Can you provide your definition of an autonomous weapon? It feels at the moment you are taking the absolute extreme position of only “autonomous” if a human was never involved. By that definition a human deciding to build an autonomous weapon automatically makes the weapon not autonomous…

Well regardless, Claude was used in Palantir's Maven system to identify targets to bomb. One of those targets was the Minab elementary school.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/mar/...

> Two sources confirmed to NBC News that Palantir’s AI systems, which draw in part on large language model technology, were used to identify targets. (Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, said he “can’t go into specifics” when asked about this on CNBC, but said that Claude was still integrated into Palantir’s systems used in the Iran war.) Brad Cooper, head of the US Central Command, has boasted that the military is using AI in Iran to “sift through vast amounts of data in seconds” in order to “make smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react”.

Iran had the courtyard painted in bright pastel pink/blue colors with murals and playground markings to clearly identify it as an elementary school. The Pentagon claimed they had "outdated intelligence data"

I think the fully autonomous weapons systems restriction is not a very serious one and is very easy to circumvent.

What if you can hire a human to push a single approve button? And what if that human's job is to front load approvals by pressing the approve button a few thousand times, every morning?

Yeah, but then responsibility for the consequences of action of the system falls onto person pressing the button. I hope that no one would be willing to take such responsibility without second thought.

What part of placing a human in the loop requires telling that human what they’re approving, or even that they are approving something? Pressing a button could be as simple as following orders—or giving orders.

Interestingly enough, this and many other related ethical conundrum were covered in the Nuremberg Charter from 1945.

That is the same thing, you just added designated sacrifice person into the loop.

No fully autonomous weapons means semi autonomous weapons are allowed. Pay close attention to the wording. Mario is an expert dis-communicator.

The Iranian strikes didn’t involve autonomous weapons systems. The “AI” component was used for target selection.

The actual aiming and firing of the weapon was performed by humans. In theory the target selection was also vetted by humans, but humans relying on exactly the same data that resulted in the “AI” systems misidentification of the target.

I put “AI” in scare quotes there, because these systems are really data processing pipelines, rather than LLM style AI systems.

But he had business agreements with companies that are doing that (Palantir).

Do you understand that real politics sometimes means you need to doublespeak? You don't get the outcomes you want by speaking your direct intentions. Don't be a fool to think that what someone says is what they believe while playing these high stakes games with actors of differing motives and value systems (the current white house)

So you are saying its fine if Claude is used to bomb school children, and murder people in Venezuela, and spy on the entire world (apart from US citizens), as long as they get to kiss up to the current administration? They could have cut all ties for real, and actually had a back bone, instead they bend over backwards for whatever the current wanabee god king wants. Im sure it has nothing to do with their valuation and trying to become another trillion dollar company.

> So you are saying its fine if Claude is used to bomb school children, and murder people in Venezuela, and spy on the entire world (apart from US citizens), as long as they get to kiss up to the current administration?

It's absolutely not "fine". I'm saying maybe there's a complex region-beta paradox where we can't get to the other side of it unless some actors enter undesirable terrain (by their own measure), don't exit the stage, and play moves they'd prefer not to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Region-beta_paradox

"No, we don't buy your virtue signaling."

This sentence should be clear enough?

No, he refused the DoW demand to use Anthropic models without limits. But Anthropic still agreed to military usage of their models, including for strike planning.

He was directly asked in a Bloomberg interview whether Claude was used in the bombing of the girl’s school in Iran, and his answer was “We don’t know”.

His redline was autonomous weapons, not the death of 100 innocent girls.

they wanted someone click “ok” before firing off bombs to a thousands of, partially hallucinated, targets? They are my resistance heroes.

Blink to approve. :)

Palantir's Maven system integrates LLM models in decision making for identifying targets. It was using Claude when it identified targets in Iran, including the Minab elementary school

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/mar/...

This had nothing much to do with AI in particular though. The issue was that there had previously been a military installation at the same location, but the US military did not update its database. Apparently, one analyst had flagged the issue for review in 2019, but that was never done before the strike.

The point is that the same thing could have happened just as easily if you had selected targets based on the faulty data by any other means than an AI model.

Sounds like you're saying the bar for bombing children should be "someone else could have made this mistake"

I disagree. It’s possible that AI removed more people from the chain and that more human involvement could have prevented it from happening.

No, the reports specifically mention that the AI target selection pipeline drastically increased the workload and expectations of the humans in the loop, leading to spending far less time on deciding whether to attack, iirc a few seconds per targeting decision.

Of course some overworked analyst is going to start neglecting the details and erring on the side of bomb it if the AI summary is dangerous sounding.

It’s gross negligence to be offloading this type of analysis to claude. Do you decide what’s factual based on the google AI summary? They’re deciding to end thousands of lives with about the same amount of rigor, including those schoolchildren. Have some humanity.

No. The point is that people are using AI for this, which was the question your parent comment was answering.

Humans select the wrong targets, computer select the wrong targets. It’s just that people really don’t care unless it’s hurting their bottom line.

That's no excuse. The US has 161 public schools on military bases, more than any other country.

The Minab elementary school was painted in pastels and had prominent murals on the play area.

If anything, your comment just highlights how much this has to do with AI. When "outdated data" can lead to 168 dead schoolchildren, you can really see the consequences of relying on AI for decision making.

The elementary school built where a military facility was previously located...

No, even google maps knew it wasn't a military site anymore. I guess schools near american bases are fair gane according to you?

You act like we intentionally targeted a school. We didn't. We targeted a military facility that was in the exact location the school was in. Check the NYT analysis of it

There was a _school_ in thee exact location the school was in. Besides, when the expectation was to leave most of target selection to automated systems, one could arguably say that there was intentional targeting, due to the lack of human oversight.

"But the AI did it!" -- never did, never will, it cannot have agency, AGI is a lie, etc etc.

once upon a time you would have complained about cannons being used instead of good ol' arrows and swords. Get with the times. AI in war is inevitable and it never going to go away

Get with the times. Nukes and chemical weapons in war is inevitable and never going away

No, only for domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. It can be used to evaluate targets as long as a human pulls the trigger. But the DoD created a really strange position for itself, they use Claude, but also designed it as a supply chain threat, which should mean they cannot use it

“We are also left with no further information about the potential use of artificial intelligence in the targeting decision. The CEO of Anthropic admitted in an interview with Bloomberg that he does not know if or how their artificial intelligence software may have been used to select targets for U. S. attacks in Iran, but he was quick to shift blame to the military, in particular to an unnamed ‘human’ making final targeting decisions.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/06/usa-four-mont...

Yeah Dario is just flat out disgusting in term of how shamelessly hypocritical he is.

Do people actually believe that he gives a shit about the well being of the Chinese people? If the U.S. starts a war with China start bombing Chinese cities Dario would absolutely jump onboard supporting it. He'd probably make Claude to add DeepSeek and Moonshot HQ to the targeting list lmao.

He is super pro-Israel as well, and never once has he brought up the risk of the Israeli government using AI to control and repress people in other countries.

He is also 100% onboard with working with Palantir, who has the explicit goal of using AI for population control and repression and building out a surveillance state.

Meanwhile the world's most repressive government is North Korea, and obviously they don't even need AI to achieve that.

If you talk to people in China they'd laugh their ass off at Dario's notion that somehow they are all getting oppressed by DeepSeek or Kimi.

[flagged]

Please don't just copy paste existing comments

I thought the comment was a positive contribution.

Whatever else it might be, it’s not positive.

I just mean they verbatim copied it from another comment they wrote in this thread

But it's quite possible I'm being too anal

I didn't see that other comment and I appreciated the presence of the comment in question.

The emptiness of AI companies' waxing poetic about the future of humankind is laid bare by simply looking at what they actually do, and who they do business with. Actions speak louder than words, and they've driven the worth of their words into the dirt many times over.

> Meanwhile the world's most repressive government is North Korea, and obviously they don't even need AI to achieve that.

The country that exists solely because of China? That North Korea?

I mean I get your point, all of these guys are elitist authoritarians who will do anything for a buck, but I wouldn't bring up the DPRK in this discussion.

The country that exists because it has nuclear capabilities.

No, it exists because 1) China shoved back UN forces from the Yalu and 2) their allies, now in charge of everything north of the 38th parallel, aimed a bunch of artillery at Seoul in case there was ever a thought of the ROK and its allies reunifying the country through force, or any other mechanism the Kim family didn't approve of.

The nuclear part is really just gilding the lily. Of course, China and Russia have helped North Korea circumvent the sanctions that were supposed to punish them for their nuclear program, but it ultimately all goes back to the Chinese support of Kim Il-Sung during the Korean War.

The US exists solely because of France.

As an American, I blame most of the world's issues on the French and the British, so this tracks.

The bombing of the school was horrible, but it was a mistake. I could see essentially the opposite argument: Anthropic should be more involved as to prevent mistakes in the future with better technology. Imagine Claude asking the decision makers at CENTCOM "this looks like a school, are you sure you want this added as a target?"

You’re absolutely right to push back. It was indeed a school. I’ll save <schoo_name> in my memory for the future.

You don't get to start a completely unprovoked and illegal war of aggression, bomb tons of targets with little care, kill 100 schoolchildren, and then say, "But it was a mistake."

However terrible it is, it is still a mistake unless you're accusing them of doing it deliberately.

And however much you can say about the current US Administration, I don't think they're prioritizing bombing civilians over military targets.

It's a mistake in the sense that if you go and rob a bank while shooting wildly, you only hit the customers "by mistake." That's not an excuse.

The US is bombing both military and civilian targets, by the way. Trump has been very open about this with his talk about "power-plant day." He considers attacking civilian targets to be a legitimate way of pressuring Iran to surrender.

The DoW head sees half of his own country’s population as enemies, Islam as an evil religion of hate, and the work he does as striking down the enemies of God. I heavily doubt that this man gives a single thought to children of muslims.

This is what I voted for.

Weird flex.

Hegseth deliberately closed the unit that used to ensure it wont happen. The efforts to avoid civilian causaulities were deemed woke, weak and literally unmanly.

And administration repeatedly threatened to destroy civilian targets.

a mistake that might be caused by the fact no one cares. an avoidable mistake.

> The bombing of the school was horrible, but it was a mistake

Please don't say this. It wasn't a mistake.

The very FIRST strike packages of the war are very clearly vetted. If you are involved in military planning, you know this.

They doubled tapped it after seeing people flee inside the save the children.

The goal here was to teach IRGC a lesson and demoralize Iranians, which clearly backfired.

Furthermore, US has been contentiously bombing civilian buildings, bridges, hospitals throughout the war. They have also bombed water desalination plants and other key infrastructure.

You have the US president threatening to use nuclear weapons and end the Persian civilization.

Let's not pretend.

> The goal here was to teach IRGC a lesson and demoralize Iranians, which clearly backfired.

I'm not so sure. A school in the US being bombed would hardly be expected to demoralize us. Quite the opposite.

What if the goal was to goad them into taking action that could justify boots on the ground? But they didn't fall for it and here we are.

Ignoring the obvious joke about "random incidents" in schools regularly in America, is it not the case that the country with the most capacity to retaliate anywhere in the world would not be "demoralized"? I see the possibility that the effect of such terrorism might be different from place to place.

I find it totally implausible that the president or any subordinates intentionally targeted a school. As I recall it was located next to a military base. A mistake seems more likely.

If these last few years have taught us anything is that what was once considered "implausible" has certainly changed. I'll leave it at that.

I like how he cited the current Trump administration in section about stifling decent.

You act as if anyone was happy to hit an elementary school. I'm sure everyone involved feels it was a terrible tragedy

You give too much credit. Many think of it as an acceptable cost of waging war, not something to waste regret on. Some few think of it as a positive (they chant death to America over there).

I've never heard anyone say it was a positive. While you're absolutely right that many would say that it was a casualty of war and that we have to expect some amount of mistakes to be made that does not mean there is not regret.

Many of my conservative acquaintances find the death of those kids to be regrettable in the way you come back to find your car over the line regret your parking job. Certainly they do not feel the tragedy nor any responsibility.

The some few i mentioned who see it as a positive are the ones who say nuke Iran, the only good Iranian is a dead Iranian etc. They might not come out and say I’m glad those schoolchildren are dead because they’ll know they’ll get pilloried. But make no mistake in what they believe.

I find this really hard to believe. People are sick of the Islamic Republic regime, not the person on the street. If anyone implies the two are the same thing then they're being intellectually lazy but I bet if you pressed you'd still find them capable of nuance. People do have some humanity even if little patience for a terror exporting regime

Fox News et al repeat that their populace chants death to America in the streets, as a means to justify the war to their viewership. It’s not a stretch to assume that a small number of consumers of that media would take that message to heart. Of course I don’t have to make such an assumption, I’ve met them.

Yes they routinely call for death to us but I'm just pointing out that I have very rarely heard us call for death to their people.. only to the regime. In fact I really illuminates the difference. the drfenders of the regime like the gloss over this fact. A lot of people in the wwst like to make this about domestic politics instead of justice and I suppose for those people they wouldn't say they're defending the regime they're just trying to score points. So be it there's going to be people who do that I get it.

Source?

The burden of proof is with you.. show me evidence of someone happy to have hit an elementary school

I can neither confirm or deny if the Pentagon agrees with you.

The elementary school example is a clear sign of bad faith. Neither Iran or the USA have intentionally blown up any school children.

They waited till the parents were searching the rubble for their children before the "double tap" strike.

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