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Comment by monk_grilla | 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...

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?

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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. 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?

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. :)

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.

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...

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