Zaynab

analyst

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

Bloomberg just dropped the most disturbing investigation I have read this year, and every AI builder should read it and take it seriously.

On February 28, two Tomahawk missiles hit an elementary school in Minab, a small town in southern Iran. 156 people died. At least 123 were children. The Pentagon knew within hours that it had bombed a school.

The school had its own website. It was labeled on Google Maps. You could see the soccer pitch from a satellite view. You could see the brightly painted walls. Any 12-year-old with a browser could tell what the building was.

The AI system could not.

Inside US Central Command, personnel were using Palantir's Maven Smart System. It is an AI targeting platform running on a $1.3 billion Pentagon contract, and embedded inside it is Anthropic's Claude.

On day one of the war, more than 1,000 targets went through it in 24 hours. Work that used to take a team hours per target got compressed into minutes.

The satellite imagery Maven was pulling from was seven years old. The site was still tagged in the database as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard facility.

The system spat it out as a recommended day-one target. Humans signed off. The first missile flew. Then a second one landed minutes later to hit the people who came to help.

Investigators later found that some Central Command staff had assumed Maven would flag stale intelligence for them. It did not. Nobody had told it to.

Palantir told Bloomberg the government is responsible for the underlying data. The Pentagon's civilian harm mitigation team, the people whose actual job is to catch a target like this, had been cut back before the war started.

This is not AI going rogue. This is the opposite.

This is AI doing exactly what it was built to do at exactly the speed it was built to do it. And a school full of little girls got vaporized because the humans in the loop trusted the machine more than they trusted their own eyes.

I keep thinking about the version of this story that comes next. What happens when the system is faster. When the target list is not 1,000 in a day but 10,000. When "review" becomes a button the operator has three seconds to hit before the next target loads. When there is no human left slow enough to notice that a soccer pitch is not a helipad.

We are not talking about a spam filter mislabeling an email. We are talking about a system that turned a seven-year-old database entry into two cruise missiles landing on children in the middle of a morning class.

A UN-backed panel has now called it a potential war crime.

In terms of children killed, it is the deadliest American targeting error of the entire 21st century. And according to Bloomberg, some of Defense Secretary Hegseth's own advisors are worried that too much public scrutiny of Maven might slow down its adoption inside the Pentagon.

Read that last line again.

If you build this stuff, you own what it does. You do not get to hide behind "the government owns the data." The whole pitch of your product is that speed and integration save lives. When it takes them instead, that is also on you.

I am not against AI in defense. I am against AI in a hurry. Speed is the entire mechanism that made Minab possible. Every guardrail we already know how to build takes time, and time is exactly what the system was designed to eliminate.

So here is the question I have not been able to stop asking, and I genuinely want to know what you think.

If a piece of software helped kill 123 children in a single morning while behaving exactly as designed, what does "responsible AI" even mean anymore?

[Dave DeCamp @DecampDave]

The AP interviewed Heydar Sadeghi, whose 11-year-old grandson and daughter-in-law, a teacher, were killed by the US strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh School in Minab, Iran. He spends every evening at the ruins of the school to mourn. Trump still won't admit to this crime.

[nikki mccann ramírez @NikkiMcR]

Columbia had students who said this was true arrested, expelled, and stripped of their degrees. They were falsely accused of antisemitism by the international press and government for speaking out. What will the consequence be for the perpetrators admitting it? Probably nothing.

[Linda Mamoun @mamoun_linda]

A dozen dead Israelis would be called a massacre. A dozen dead Palestinians is called a ceasefire.

[Brett Erickson @BrettErickson28]

I have a hard time listening to people whine about freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz whilst the United States is causing a humanitarian crisis in Cuba because... of a lack of freedom of navigation

[abdullah baabood عبدالله باعبود @abaabood]

When headlines say a missile “finds” patrons instead of stating that innocent civilians were killed, journalism risks sanitizing violence. Words shape perception, and euphemisms should never obscure the perpetrator, in this case genocidal Israel or Palestinian suffering.

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

Students were arrested for protesting this.

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

It’s not a natural disaster, Israel destroyed their homes, destroyed the water systems, blocks aid and reconstruction, on purpose.

It’s a deliberately engineered hellscape meant to destroy Palestinian life in Gaza. That’s what makes it genocide.

[Ashok Kumar @comrade_kumar_]

Take notes kids this is how you answer cynical accusations of antisemitism

[PitBackle @PitBackle]

We didn't win against Iran but at least it didn't cost us 300 billion USD. 🤷‍♂️

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

Some common-sense things Trump said today that were nevertheless shocking:

Everybody else has ballistic missiles, why can’t Iran?

The frozen money belonged to Iran, and the U.S. needed to release it otherwise nobody would trust the dollar system. Why should we steal their money?

Neighboring countries use nuclear power for electricity, why can’t Iran?

Israel shouldn’t knock down entire buildings in Beirut every time a drone or two crashes harmlessly in the desert.

Trump would’ve become Herbert Hoover in a few weeks once oil ran out and the market crashed. He had no choice but to end the war.

[Kenneth Roth @KenRoth]

As a US-Iranian deal seems like it might be closer, Israel predictably bombs the Beirut suburbs, evidently hoping to sabotage the deal. Why does Trump put up with this and continue to arm and fund such obstructionism? https://t.co/lilzwfInWx

[Ramzi Kaiss / رمزي قيس @kaiss_ramzi]

In just two months, Israeli attacks in Lebanon have killed at least 3468 people, including:
244 children
128 medical workers
333 women

Israel attacks have also damaged at least 17 hospitals.

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

They want to distract you with stories about Trump yelling at Netanyahu while, in the real world, Israel is destroying southern Lebanon.

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

Israeli officials: Flatten the suburbs of Beirut

Western media: Israel expanding incursion against Hezbollah

[Ilan Goldenberg @ilangoldenberg]

I worked on many Iran war planning scenarios over the years.  I’ll admit I never gamed out the “let’s secretly try to replace the regime with Ahmadinjad and blow up his home to free him from house arrest and accidentally badly injure him” plan.  

A modern day Bay of Pigs.

[Yousef Munayyer @YousefMunayyer]

"My reporting for this article is based on conversations with 14 men and women who said they had been sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers or members of the security forces. I also spoke to family members, investigators, officials and others."

And yet this had to run in Opinion to make the pages of the NYT. @nytimes news editors are seemingly collaborating in the conspiracy of silence around the sexual abuse of Palestinians.

https://t.co/L99LB38FXg?

[Trita Parsi @tparsi]

If you, in a private conversation on a train in the UK, express criticism of Zionism, British police will hunt you down to arrest you.

#priorities

[Robert Malley @Rob_Malley]

In other words the war’s objectives are to recover an HEU stockpile that wouldn’t exist had Trump not torn up the deal, and to reopen the strait of Hormuz that would not be shut had he not initiated the war …