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AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing.

The truth is far more worrying by Kevin T. Baker, read by Adam Sims. On the first morning of Operation Epic Fury, 28 February, 2026, American forces struck the Shajara

Tayava primary school in Minab in southern Iran,

hitting the building at least two times during the morning session.

American forces killed between 175 and 180 people,

most of them girls, between the ages of 7 and twelve.

Within days, the question that organized the coverage was whether Claude, a chatbot made by Anthropic, had selected the school as a target.

Congress wrote to the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, about the extent of AI use in the strikes.

The New Yorker magazine asked whether Claude could be trusted to obey orders in combat,

whether it might resort to blackmail as a self-preservation strategy,

and whether the Pentagon's chief concern should be

that the chatbot had a personality. Almost none of this had any relationship to reality.

The targeting for Operation Epic Fury ran on a system called Maven. Nobody was arguing about Maven. Eight years ago, Maven was the most

contested project in Silicon Valley. In 2018, more than 4,000 Google employees signed a letter

opposing the company's contract to build artificial intelligence for the Pentagon's targeting systems.

Workers organized a walkout, engineers quit, and Google ultimately abandoned the contract.

Palantir Technologies, a data analytics company and defense contractor, co-founded by Peter Thiel, took it over and spent

the next six years building Maven into a targeting infrastructure that pulls together satellite

imagery, signals intelligence, and sensor data to identify targets and carry them through

...