Yet another Hacker News

Overreliance on AI contributed to missile strike on Iran school – Pentagon

176 points devonnull 1 hour ago 84 comments

allears 1 hour ago | parent

Given that everything emanating from this administration has a political agenda, does this mean that Thiel is on the outs?

ambicapter 51 minutes ago | parent

> unreleased Pentagon probe

From TFA.

esseph 40 minutes ago | parent

He's rich and connected, of course not.

vfclists 59 minutes ago | parent

The one that pulls the trigger bears the responsibility.

verdverm 45 minutes ago | parent

I would argue `s/pulls the trigger/gives the go ahead/` is intuitively more appropriate. The sailor on the boat that fired off the tomahawk (iirc) was likely not in a position to make an in-the-moment determination

esseph 40 minutes ago | parent

The one that pulls the trigger is often not the one doing any targeting, especially on a strategic strike weapon like a tomahawk. They are receiving a target data package with preprogrammed instructions. Their role is far more... mechanical. They're not seeing the targets at all.

derektank 40 minutes ago | parent

Completely disagree. When we’re talking about something like air, missile, or artillery strikes, the operator of the weapon system may literally never even see the target, on a screen or otherwise. They may simply be entering targeting information provided to them by an operations center. These decisions are social and group decisions, with distributed responsibility, which is why it’s so important to have institutions like the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence which historically has identified and helped implement the policies which prevent these kinds of disasters, but which unfortunately the current administration decided to shut down without a replacement.

Sometimes, the difference between a successful strike on a lawful combatant and disaster is one analyst pointing out that the building the enemy is hiding in is next to a square that’s used for a market on Tuesdays and wouldn’t you know it, it’s Tuesday. That’s not something the person “pulling the trigger,” can always be expected to know, which is why every ops center needs to be designed to elevate those voices, when the time comes

mito88 35 minutes ago | parent

the operator was following orders...

jacquesm 40 minutes ago | parent

No. That's too easy on the higher ups, they never pull triggers.

mhh__ 55 minutes ago | parent

Blowing up a school is proven route to diplomatic triumph and regime change!

colingauvin 50 minutes ago | parent

While I think that it's important to do root cause analysis, we need to be very careful not to absolve blame from the people that decided to shift a significant weight of decision-making authority to an AI. An AI can be tried in a court. There has to be a responsible human for everyone one of its actions, especially when it's killing (-people-) children.

I cannot believe this has come to pass.

jacquesm 42 minutes ago | parent

can -> can't

teekert 29 minutes ago | parent

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/cannot-vs-can-not-is...

Jtsummers 25 minutes ago | parent

He's referring to this sentence:

> An AI can be tried in a court.

An AI can't be tried in a court.

ceejayoz 27 minutes ago | parent

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/10/pentagon-iran-schoo...

> The Pentagon chief last year slashed offices that didn’t contribute to his goal of “lethality,” including the group that assists in limiting risk to civilians, known as the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. Around 200 employees who worked on the issue, including at that office, have been reduced by about 90 percent, according to two current and former officials and a person familiar with the effort. The team that handles civilian casualties at Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, has dropped from 10 to one.

Negligent homicide in pursuit of their DEI goals, basically.

stuaxo 18 minutes ago | parent

Do you just chuck that on the end of any sentence, because this makes less sense than an LLM.

ceejayoz 17 minutes ago | parent

People were killed, i.e. homicide.

Negligence was involved.

DEI for drunk white men who look good on TV got us Hegseth.

dmix 5 minutes ago | parent

The headline says "contributed to missile strike", not caused it.

feverzsj 49 minutes ago | parent

Despite what AI told them, they knew it was a school full of kids. They still chose to kill them all with bomb. Only maniac would do such thing.

throwaway198846 38 minutes ago | parent

> they knew it was a school full of kids.

I would like to know how you know this

lurk2 16 minutes ago | parent

I read the early life section.

bix6 47 minutes ago | parent

DOGE strikes again. Edit actually looks like it was Hegseth himself, king Testosterone.

> Staffing on civilian harm mitigation teams across the U.S. Department of Defense had also fallen by roughly 90% over recent years, shrinking to fewer than 20 people overall. Centcom’s group shrank from 10 people to one.

https://www.propublica.org/article/hegseth-civilian-harm-mit...

Edit: hilarious downvotes. Does DOGE get Elon Stan bots or something?

krapp 44 minutes ago | parent

"maximum lethality, not tepid legality."

verdverm 43 minutes ago | parent

"stupid and energetic, the worst kind of general" - Indy Neidell

derektank 37 minutes ago | parent

Paraphrasing the German General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord

verdverm 36 minutes ago | parent

in reference to a WW1 Austrian General (for others who pass by and are curious, since you seem to be in the know)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Conrad_von_H%C3%B6tzendo...

macintux 45 minutes ago | parent

Related: the U.S. nearly boarded a Chinese boat that AI incorrectly flagged as carrying nuclear weapons materiel.

https://gizmodo.com/almost-started-a-war-us-military-nearly-...

chews 45 minutes ago | parent

nice, Karp really reeled in a nice big fish, and ofcourse he is going to blame OpenAI/Anthropic for giving the targets, this explains his CNBC rants about the frontiers, his tool was the trigger in a killchain of hallucination.

verdverm 44 minutes ago | parent

time to make Palantir the next Flock

France gave them the boot, you can too

vikas123456789 44 minutes ago | parent

Whole world is turning into an unlivable place and people who are doing it are not taking responsibility.

jacquesm 41 minutes ago | parent

They never have. Their money insulates them from the consequences of their actions.

andsoitis 34 minutes ago | parent

There’s a threshold where the money won’t insulate anymore.

ceroxylon 20 minutes ago | parent

Especially if the most well funded companies won't even pay their security a living wage: https://www.kqed.org/news/12100512/bay-area-security-workers...

sys32768 43 minutes ago | parent

Tragically this won't be the last time AI kills a lot of innocent people.

angoragoats 33 minutes ago | parent

AI didn’t kill innocent people here, the Department of Defense and its decision-makers did.

elAhmo 32 minutes ago | parent

This is not AI killing poeole, this is US government killing poeole.

igleria 42 minutes ago | parent

so who is paying for this? "humans must always remain accountable for artificial intelligence (AI) decisions"

1239971 42 minutes ago | parent

An Maven AI used Claude, which was denied here multiple times. Maybe call the next model after Fable Minab!

legitster 42 minutes ago | parent

> It found the U.S. “failed in its obligation to do everything feasible to verify” that the school was a military objective and that the failure “went beyond mere negligence.” The report said the United States “directed the strikes at the building of the school while being aware of a substantial risk of striking a civilian object and acting recklessly as regards the possibility that this would happen.”

Reading the details, "AI" doesn't really seem like the culprit -it's a scapegoat.

The intelligence that it was no longer a military target never entered the target database, the team that was responsible for vetting the target list was gutted, and said team was never even consulted.

The White House wanted 1000 targets and pulled from their database without any due diligence. Whether it was an AI call or an SQL query - this was from pure human maliciousness and incompetence.

bix6 23 minutes ago | parent

https://www.propublica.org/article/hegseth-civilian-harm-mit...

legitster 12 minutes ago | parent

> “No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement,” - Hegseth

...

> Hegseth and the commander in charge of the Iran operation, Adm. Brad Cooper, were questioned about the strike before Congress. Hegseth said the U.S. does not target civilians and would investigate

So the administration does not intentionally target civilians, they have just stopped caring about who a civilian is.

xlayn 6 minutes ago | parent

Now, ask yourself if you want AI taking decisions around your life... it will pull numbers... someone will have a "goal" of 1000 "hits" and there you go, 2-3 months in jail working to check what went wrong...

But don't worry, the other P AI system will ensure that the first one doesn't do mistakes...

jmathai 40 minutes ago | parent

> The Minab site, which was cataloged as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facility due to outdated data, was fed into Maven with other candidates and came out as a recommended day-one target. Target-list work that once took hours was condensed into minutes.

I feel like we're optimizing the wrong metric here.

jacquesm 38 minutes ago | parent

I'm going to bet that absolutely nobody higher up will end up going to jail for this.

bix6 23 minutes ago | parent

Hegseth should be in prison

https://www.propublica.org/article/hegseth-civilian-harm-mit...

recroad 17 minutes ago | parent

Yup. Brown Muslims from another country are barely considered human. It's like killing an ant.

TacticalCoder 10 minutes ago | parent

> Yup. Brown Muslims from another country are barely considered human. It's like killing an ant.

Or even from the same country: let me remind you that the islamist guards in Iran slaughtered 30 000 unarmed protesters in January 2026.

I understand 123 children is catastrophic. But 123 vs 30 000: maybe we should reflect on what allowed an islamist regime to slaughter 30 000 of its own people.

FireBeyond 11 minutes ago | parent

Jail? I'm going to bet that absolutely nobody higher up will face any consequences for this. The outcome will be "we will review our processes".

sublinear 37 minutes ago | parent

Is that really the case? Stories like this always have all sides muddying waters.

The terrorists are well known to use children and the rest of the public as hostage meatshields, and the US military is always looking for something/someone else to blame for the dirty work they have to do.

The broader public is so polarized by performative politics and botspam that they eat these stories up, but nothing I'm saying is secret. It's been this way since forever. Slow news today?

I'm not even defending AI at all and think these are crappy choices, but compared to humans gathering intelligence who can go rogue, what alternative does anyone really have?

23j423j423hj 36 minutes ago | parent

It was a school. No one on either side is denying this.

ceejayoz 25 minutes ago | parent

> Stories like this always have all sides muddying waters.

Which makes the administration's near complete silence on the strike rather suspicious, no?

bix6 22 minutes ago | parent

https://www.propublica.org/article/hegseth-civilian-harm-mit...

Yes it is really the case here.

applfanboysbgon 18 minutes ago | parent

> The terrorists

What fucking terrorists? We're talking about a country bombing another country's school. A country with a population of 93 million. Are you trying to insinuate that all 93 million Iranians are terrorists?

Maybe you meant the American terrorists?

> Stories like this always have all sides muddying waters.

All sides agree that the US bombed a school full of children, actually.

imranq 37 minutes ago | parent

> Officials said some users expected Maven to flag stale records or contradictions in the intelligence assembled for potential targets, though it is not clear why they thought the system would do that

This is what happens when people who don't understand AI and its limitations embrace it wholeheartedly, thinking it's going to behave like The ultimate analyst. Except it's not. Its got blind spots in more places than anyone knows. And not to mention the system itself has multiple areas of failure.

pants2 15 minutes ago | parent

Chatbots in general can be quite opaque in how they operate, the biggest issue with agent products is communicating it's capabilities and limitations to users. If you have a bank app it's pretty clear whether or not it can send wire transfers, but a if that's a chatbot, users will have to think to ask it (and even then it could hallucinate)

shimman 11 minutes ago | parent

No, this is what happens when software developers don't understand how users actually use their products.

This was a totally expected outcome, similar to how CV cameras arrest the wrong minorities in neighboring states 100s of miles away because it told the officer it was them; or how health insurance companies use ML algorithms to deny Americans care.

It's going to happen in other sectors of life and it will continue killing innocent civilians.

banubis 34 minutes ago | parent

The pentagon says it was Palantir software’s fault, Palantir says it was the fault of bad data input to their software. Where’s the accountability by both organizations? How did we get to a world where military decisions leading to innocent deaths are responded to as if it was just another miscommunication implementing a B2B SaaS platform.

hyperhello 19 minutes ago | parent

Small children often develop coping mechanisms for their lack of agency. It may be part of these people’s worldview since early childhood that anyone who opposes them should magically die.

augment_me 13 minutes ago | parent

The new world is complex and AI technology has outpaced the regulation cycle, so it's inevitable that we come to a place where you don't have accountability and can never have it because 0) the courts can't handle the case, they don't have the frameworks for it, so it takes longer time 1) you can overload the courts with slop, 2) by the time there is a decision the world has moved on and technology has moved on

Really good time to do various crime.

gambiting 8 minutes ago | parent

To me it's extremely obvious that this is the desired outcome - no accountability for anyone with this setup.

angoragoats 34 minutes ago | parent

In a just world, Pete Hegseth and the entire board of Palantir would be in prison for this.

sedan_baklazhan 30 minutes ago | parent

That is absolutely irrelevant. USA will never take responsibility. Nobody will be prosecuted. No compensations will be paid.

RIMR 29 minutes ago | parent

I don't want to see the Pentagon try to pass the blame here, but I am all for giving half the blame to Palantir.

Zigurd 23 minutes ago | parent

You're absolutely right, those were innocent children. I apologize for the error. Would you like to know more about war crimes?

onlyrealcuzzo 22 minutes ago | parent

Wait... I thought they said they didn't kill children and that was Iranian propaganda.

> That didn't happen.

> And if it did, it wasn't that bad.

> And if it was, it was AI's fault, not mine.

ceejayoz 20 minutes ago | parent

C'mon, a Palantir AI isn't gonna talk like Claude.

It's gonna say something like "they were all military-aged males". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military-age_male

moralestapia 23 minutes ago | parent

TIL about this attack.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack

This looks as much, if not more, like terrorism to me than other incidents the media endlessly portrays.

The US has done so much evil around the world. Enough is enough.

And yeah, Alex Karp is a complete idiot. I cannot imagine how vile one has to be to make a profit off this.

ck2 21 minutes ago | parent

first, closer to 250 people were murdered by the $4 Million tomahawk

second, imagine if Iran even accidentally took out an elementary school in the US filled with 250 people

third, there was a human group that was supposed to review targets regardless of whomever picked them, the group was purposely disbanded, that's negligent homicide at best but more clearly a war crime on purpose

fourth, let's say it was 250 soldiers somehow among a civilian setting, IT CHANGED NOTHING, this war will change nothing, they cannot destroy pickaxe mountain, they will abandon the war in 2029 like the US abandoned Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam and Korea, WAR CHANGES NOTHING, you cannot "War to Peace"

underlipton 20 minutes ago | parent

Never so happy to see such an obvious scapegoat get thrown under the bus. I don't buy it for a second, but no tears will be shed if the stock market does.

cpursley 19 minutes ago | parent

They are also openly and proudly using this system along with Starlink to assist Ukraine, who a couple months ago killed a bunch of teens in a college in East Ukraine under very similar circumstances that a simple Google or Yandex maps search would have red-flagged plus on the ground real human intel. Unless the point was actually to kill kids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Starobilsk_strike

allknowingfrog 10 minutes ago | parent

I think your source is undermining your claim. That Wikipedia article strongly suggests that the whole event was fabricated by Russia.

FireBeyond 9 minutes ago | parent

Says the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry, which then immediately refused to allow the UN access to verify the claim.

ceejayoz 4 minutes ago | parent

The account in question has a history of being… deeply credulous of Russian claims.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47441817

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36559017

etc.

impossiblefork 18 minutes ago | parent

Personally I'm more interested in the justification for the second and third strikes.

There needs to be some protection for first responders and others helping the injured.

FireBeyond 12 minutes ago | parent

Israel likes to argue that Hamas embeds fighters with first responders, which even if so, they're still responding to injured. But Israel considers this not even collateral damage but justified.

Mind you Israel is currently funding a lobbyist organization in the UK to flag Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) as a terrorist group (because many years ago a couple of people who had affiliations with other anti-Israel groups were found to be also affiliated with MSF).

impossiblefork 4 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, I've heard about it, but presumable Americans soldiers still care about IHL at least to some degree, even though they've historically not bothered with the Geneva convention and have tortured people.

63 17 minutes ago | parent

It's easy to blame the military and the higher-ups, after all they made this choice. But more relevant to HN, this couldn't have happened without technology professionals working for Palantir.

> A Palantir spokesperson told Bloomberg the company “is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies” and that there is no evidence its software was at fault.

If you work for Palantir, you are writing software that kills people. Software that, in this case, killed 123 children. What salary is worth that?

I encourage others who work in the public sector, whether directly or through a contractor, to read and internalize Don't Get Distracted by Caleb Hearth [0]. I think about it nearly every day.

[0] https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted

PorciiVorbesc 6 minutes ago | parent

>It's easy to blame the military and the higher-ups

My brother in Cthulu, they're the ones making the life or death decision, who else should be to blame?

>But more relevant to HN, this couldn't have happened without technology professionals working for Palantir.

If you wanna go that scapegoat route then none of this would have happened if DARPA wouldn't have invented the internet, or if Thomas Edison wouldn't have invented the lightbulb, or if the fish haven't venture onto land and make us land mammals.

italiansolider 15 minutes ago | parent

It was intentional and it's part of the zionist culture.

conn10mfan 1 minute ago | parent

ultimately someone or a group of people need to be held criminally accountable for this crime. it is on the magnitude of the my lai massacre and there should be justice for the victims