The claim now is:
Middlebury College professor Jeffrey Lewis, who specializes in satellite imagery, told NPR that satellite images appear to be consistent with precision military strikes. Images show “very precise targeting,” with “almost all the buildings” in the compound being struck, he said.But Prof Lewis said the strike may have been the result of an error.
Earlier satellite images show that the school and nearby buildings were once part of the adjoining IRGC compound, but the school was separated from the base by a wall between 2013 and 2016. A nearby clinic was walled off between 2022 and 2024, images show.
Lewis believes it is possible that American military planners had not updated their target sets, he told NPR.
“There are thousands of targets across Iran, and so there will be teams in the United States and Israel that are responsible for tracking those targets and updating them,” he said. “It’s possible that the target didn’t get updated.”
The strikes were among 1,000 targets within the first 24 hours of the campaign, relying on the Pentagon’s Maven Smart System, which was constructed by data mining company Palantir.
Embedded within that system is Anthropic’s AI tool Claude.
“There’s been plenty of speculation here that AI inputs in the targeting process were responsible for the school being targeted,” noted Nathan Ruser with Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a defense analyst think tank. “This is possible, but a human analyst determining aimpoints could have absolutely made the mistake of adding this school to the target list.”
So many things come to mind.
First ... are we reallly doing this? Are we really letting AI make the choices of where we bomb? Or is this just a parting shat from Pentagon to Anthropic? Pretty ugly either way and just a word of caution to AI companies everywhere: once you get in bed with the military, any military, you are complicit in their crimes.
Second ... I understand old intel going back to 2022. Or 2023. Ok, I'll be generous and say 2021. After all 5 years fly like an arrow. But 9 years old intel? 13 years old intel? And yet ... we know exactly wheere Khamenei and apparently the people we wanted to take his place were going to be on exact time that we struck them? Two and two don't add up. You are either so bad at inteling that you should not be in the warmaking business at all (and it *is* a business) or you're actually good at that and you just didn't care less to confirm that what you knew to be true in 2012 was wtill true today.
ANd how is an AI company involved in making a decision based on data that is 13 years old? How much AI does it take to decide a building that you believe is a Revolutionary Guard building should be a target?
(So no ... woody, they did *not* put the strategic target next to a school. They created a school out of a military (or is it paramilitary) installation. Chew on that a little. Swords to plowshares, dude).
What I really want to know, and that will tip my hand on wwhat my null assumption is at this point, is how much of the intel and the targeting comes from Israel. We know Khamenei's daily meeting schedule comes from them? How much of the targets do they provide? Because bombing a school is a thing that IDF is way too comfortable with doing, as we saw in the past few years in Gaza. You know. The worlds moralest army of all times!!