Whether this is confirmed or not, we have countless examples of AI used in targeting in Gaza.
Anthropic were very vocal, well before this happened, that they were against the use case.
I don't blame them. These use cases are like blaming MySQL for storing the lat/long of the school. AI can't be held accountable and the company was trying to protect us and, yes, it was too late.
I mean, they've made the argument that their computer learns like a human, so should be able to get away with ingesting all the data it sees, the same way a human does.
Why shouldn't it also go to jail, the same way a human does?
Yes. Claude exists on physical media somewhere. Put that media in a cell with no access to the internet. No one must access Claude outside of visitation hours.
Just because it's difficult doesn't mean it can't be done. If you're claiming your machine should be treated like a human, then let's treat it like a human.
It's a funny way of imposing a very large fine. Make the service only available during predefined "visitation hours", prevent updated learning except from resources available in the prison, restrict speech and actions according to prison rules etc.
> Anthropic were very vocal, well before this happened, that they were against the use case.
> I don't blame them. These use cases are like blaming MySQL for storing the lat/long of the school. AI can't be held accountable and the company was trying to protect us and, yes, it was too late.
They weren't trying to protect squat, and were not against this use case. Their only two red lines are "no mass domestic surveillance" and "no fully autonomous killing until the AI gets good enough to be able to do it". Assuming the story is true, there's no chance this was a fully autonomous act and was most certainly approved and executed by people.
The modern right wing is all in on AI tools, in part because of their particular beliefs about the nature of expertise and general humanity.
We’ve seen AI tools used for tons and tons of inappropriate things over the last year. Reviewing research grants, aid programs, and regulations? Why not? Publishing propaganda on Twitter? Sure thing! Finding “fraud” in state benefits? Absolutely!
There’s a belief amongst these people that AI tools are better than human judgement and represent an inevitable future where CEO kings operate the world. Why not also apply it to war?
One possibility would be: when I look at the current administration, it's a bunch of bros that don't really know anything except how to succeed between other bros they spend time with, so they need Claude for anything that involves actually knowing something. It's a stretch because you would hope the army is not run by morons, but I would no longer bet that they didn't do this because Hegseth asked Claude and influenced the decision after discussing it over Signal with other bros. The culture is driven by the person in charge, who is also incompetent for anything that doesn't involve dealing with loans and still making out ok despite the bankruptcy.
Maybe, but on any given subject, most of us haven't done any investigation at all. An article written by actual journalists based on what sources tell them beats whatever our uninformed opinions are on the subject.
As far as I know, wasn't Claude banned from use in the Pentagon a few days ago, exactly for taking a weak stance against this kind of thing?
> Even if Amodei’s scruples had somehow magically prevented the bombing of that school, Claude would still be an accomplice to mass murder.
This point from the nonzero blog I take issue with. If they had used Google Maps to pick targets, would that make Maps an accomplice?
The people who pushed the button to launch the missiles that hit the school, and the people who ordered them to do that, are fully responsible here, not the tools they used.
> The people who pushed the button to launch the missiles that hit the school, and the people who ordered them to do that, are fully responsible here, not the tools they used.
Absolutely. A real issue here is the normalizing of "AI scapegoating".
The real failure? Not following through on human verification of a "strong lead".
The Iran school site absolutely was _once_ a target, in the distant past - it's sited on and within a former Iranian Guard post with airstrip, etc.
The part that needed strong checking was "history since last identified as a target" - and that site has a history of disrepair and abandonment.
The debatable issue was whether the larger site did indeed store significant military assets underground, etc. which was entirely possible.
Didn't read the articles, but at least the planners know and understand a map.
SO... a map is static reference. A calculator is deterministic computation. An LLM is probabilistic generation
In high-stakes environments like military planning, tools that generate new claims rather than reference known data introduce a different class of risk.
Yes, everyone is responsible for their own decisions. But then circle back to risk. How can the planners be sure they aren't dealing with hallucinations, questionable data, differing outputs based on prompts, and a long list of other things...
> How can the planners be sure they aren't dealing with hallucinations, questionable data, differing outputs based on prompts, and a long list of other things...
I'm not sure they care nor do I know who holds stealth bombers accountable. We're back in the might makes right world.
Like so much war reporting in the past decade, there's a lot of low-effort moralising and low-confidence maybes being strung together to create headline narrative that the body text simply cannot cash. And it waves away the critical distinction between bad intelligence and actively targeting civilians.
Surely nobody is arguing that an Anthropic AI, with perfect knowledge that it's a school, and that students would be present, chose to knowingly murder children. Assuming this was a US military strike and not a false flag, surely nobody is arguing that the failure here was in relying on outdated intelligence about an ex-military building.
The use of AI here is simply not relevant.
The criticism I have for the current US government is massive, and my disgust for the current leadership is as intense as anyone else here, I'd wager. But there's also no doubt in my mind that if they knew it was a school, they wouldn't not have targeted it. By contrast, Russia's government shows who they are when they target civilians in Ukraine. That distinction is important and we muddy it at our own peril.
>Consider, for example, Bill Clinton’s decision to expand NATO, a decision that paved the path to the Ukraine War. Pretty much every expert on the Soviet Union opposed this move, some of them vehemently
Bullshit. While many experts opposed the move, many were in favor of it too. And nonchalantly deciding it paved the way to Putin's senseless attack on Ukraine is a dumb Russian talking point
Standard Hacker News is heavily "moderated" these days (if not by the mods themselves then by mobocracies misusing tools), which means that anything that falls outside the Happy Silicon Valley / Everything Is Good / Nothing Is Wrong narrative will get flagged and buried.
As a result, sadly, it's become basically a Reddit style echo chamber, where negative news is suppressed. Often, the justification is "it's politics!", as perhaps might be the case here. Despite the fact that Silicon Valley's products, and Silicon Valley itself, are becoming more entangled with "politics" and the US government than ever.
There are better tools than Reddit to see what gets swept under the moderation rug, at least.
Whether this is confirmed or not, we have countless examples of AI used in targeting in Gaza.
Anthropic were very vocal, well before this happened, that they were against the use case.
I don't blame them. These use cases are like blaming MySQL for storing the lat/long of the school. AI can't be held accountable and the company was trying to protect us and, yes, it was too late.
"A Computer Can Never Be Held Accountable Therefore a Computer Must Never Make a Management Decision"
I remember this but I can't remember where it's from? IBM?
Yes: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be...
I mean, they've made the argument that their computer learns like a human, so should be able to get away with ingesting all the data it sees, the same way a human does.
Why shouldn't it also go to jail, the same way a human does?
What? How? By putting the computer or robot that made mistake in a prison cell?
Yes. Claude exists on physical media somewhere. Put that media in a cell with no access to the internet. No one must access Claude outside of visitation hours.
Just because it's difficult doesn't mean it can't be done. If you're claiming your machine should be treated like a human, then let's treat it like a human.
I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not…
It's a funny way of imposing a very large fine. Make the service only available during predefined "visitation hours", prevent updated learning except from resources available in the prison, restrict speech and actions according to prison rules etc.
I mean, the problem is whoever follow the suggestion without double checking
I bet there is some moronic explanation. I have no doubt at this point and how things are going.
Well at least you know who to fire
[flagged]
> The only ROE they follow with any consistency is "Don't shoot Jews".
Except Arabic or Ethiopian Jews. They have a bit of leeway that way.
And hostages coming towards you with their hands up speaking Hebrew.
> These use cases are like blaming MySQL for storing the lat/long of the school.
A storage layer versus a decision making system? What a ridiculous comparison.
> Anthropic were very vocal, well before this happened, that they were against the use case.
> I don't blame them. These use cases are like blaming MySQL for storing the lat/long of the school. AI can't be held accountable and the company was trying to protect us and, yes, it was too late.
They weren't trying to protect squat, and were not against this use case. Their only two red lines are "no mass domestic surveillance" and "no fully autonomous killing until the AI gets good enough to be able to do it". Assuming the story is true, there's no chance this was a fully autonomous act and was most certainly approved and executed by people.
I would also challenge "no mass domestic surveillance"
[dead]
Gaza as a defining standard for war crimes and state terrorism : https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-cal...
No. We need to stop making things up and spreading propaganda.
[dead]
What I can't understand is why? Let's ignore the moral question for a second. I can't imagine an LLM is the right tool for this at all.
When you have a hammer as big as an LLM a lot of problems start to look like nails.
It's basically an OSINT query tool.
Volume vs accuracy
"Maybe we break a couple eggs making this omelette!"
Where omelette?
The modern right wing is all in on AI tools, in part because of their particular beliefs about the nature of expertise and general humanity.
We’ve seen AI tools used for tons and tons of inappropriate things over the last year. Reviewing research grants, aid programs, and regulations? Why not? Publishing propaganda on Twitter? Sure thing! Finding “fraud” in state benefits? Absolutely!
There’s a belief amongst these people that AI tools are better than human judgement and represent an inevitable future where CEO kings operate the world. Why not also apply it to war?
One possibility would be: when I look at the current administration, it's a bunch of bros that don't really know anything except how to succeed between other bros they spend time with, so they need Claude for anything that involves actually knowing something. It's a stretch because you would hope the army is not run by morons, but I would no longer bet that they didn't do this because Hegseth asked Claude and influenced the decision after discussing it over Signal with other bros. The culture is driven by the person in charge, who is also incompetent for anything that doesn't involve dealing with loans and still making out ok despite the bankruptcy.
There doesn't seem to be any reporting in the blog post linked to by this tweet? Here's the news story it seems to be based on:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthrop...
https://archive.ph/bOJkE
Unfortunately, WaPo has lost credibility for this type of reporting
Maybe, but on any given subject, most of us haven't done any investigation at all. An article written by actual journalists based on what sources tell them beats whatever our uninformed opinions are on the subject.
Actual article, rather than Twitter link:
https://www.nonzero.org/p/iran-and-the-immorality-of-openai
This uses this Washington Post article as a source
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthrop...
(Non paywall: https://archive.is/bOJkE)
As far as I know, wasn't Claude banned from use in the Pentagon a few days ago, exactly for taking a weak stance against this kind of thing?
> Even if Amodei’s scruples had somehow magically prevented the bombing of that school, Claude would still be an accomplice to mass murder.
This point from the nonzero blog I take issue with. If they had used Google Maps to pick targets, would that make Maps an accomplice?
The people who pushed the button to launch the missiles that hit the school, and the people who ordered them to do that, are fully responsible here, not the tools they used.
> The people who pushed the button to launch the missiles that hit the school, and the people who ordered them to do that, are fully responsible here, not the tools they used.
Absolutely. A real issue here is the normalizing of "AI scapegoating".
The real failure? Not following through on human verification of a "strong lead".
The Iran school site absolutely was _once_ a target, in the distant past - it's sited on and within a former Iranian Guard post with airstrip, etc.
The part that needed strong checking was "history since last identified as a target" - and that site has a history of disrepair and abandonment.
The debatable issue was whether the larger site did indeed store significant military assets underground, etc. which was entirely possible.
> Claude banned from use in the Pentagon a few days ago
Not exactly, you might want to reread the news to understand what's actually happening.
Didn't read the articles, but at least the planners know and understand a map.
SO... a map is static reference. A calculator is deterministic computation. An LLM is probabilistic generation
In high-stakes environments like military planning, tools that generate new claims rather than reference known data introduce a different class of risk.
Yes, everyone is responsible for their own decisions. But then circle back to risk. How can the planners be sure they aren't dealing with hallucinations, questionable data, differing outputs based on prompts, and a long list of other things...
> Didn't read the articles
Then kindly shut the fuck up.
> How can the planners be sure they aren't dealing with hallucinations, questionable data, differing outputs based on prompts, and a long list of other things...
I'm not sure they care nor do I know who holds stealth bombers accountable. We're back in the might makes right world.
Like so much war reporting in the past decade, there's a lot of low-effort moralising and low-confidence maybes being strung together to create headline narrative that the body text simply cannot cash. And it waves away the critical distinction between bad intelligence and actively targeting civilians.
Surely nobody is arguing that an Anthropic AI, with perfect knowledge that it's a school, and that students would be present, chose to knowingly murder children. Assuming this was a US military strike and not a false flag, surely nobody is arguing that the failure here was in relying on outdated intelligence about an ex-military building.
The use of AI here is simply not relevant.
The criticism I have for the current US government is massive, and my disgust for the current leadership is as intense as anyone else here, I'd wager. But there's also no doubt in my mind that if they knew it was a school, they wouldn't not have targeted it. By contrast, Russia's government shows who they are when they target civilians in Ukraine. That distinction is important and we muddy it at our own peril.
Two-faces' coin is responsible for his actions
Technology isn't intrinsically good or evil. It's how it's used. Like the Death Ray.
Anthropic is not "technology". Anthropic is people, such as this Amodei, a filthy murderer at the service of the big capital.
Discussion (34 points, 2 days ago, 34 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286236
direct link to the Substack post (instead of a Twitter post linking to it): https://www.nonzero.org/p/iran-and-the-immorality-of-openai
That must be one of the most biased analyses on Iran I have read.
Or maybe one of the less biased?
>Consider, for example, Bill Clinton’s decision to expand NATO, a decision that paved the path to the Ukraine War. Pretty much every expert on the Soviet Union opposed this move, some of them vehemently
Bullshit. While many experts opposed the move, many were in favor of it too. And nonchalantly deciding it paved the way to Putin's senseless attack on Ukraine is a dumb Russian talking point
No evidence, low quality articlea. Meanwhile Iran regime bomb civilians all over the middle east
Without fluff, where is the direct claim and evidence?
Reminder that the very first computer was built for computing artillery tables.
Technology has generally been driven by war, and now is no different.
It wasn't
Why is this post flagged?
There's been a lot of pro-Claude jerking on HN lately, but anything against it gets buried?
Standard Hacker News is heavily "moderated" these days (if not by the mods themselves then by mobocracies misusing tools), which means that anything that falls outside the Happy Silicon Valley / Everything Is Good / Nothing Is Wrong narrative will get flagged and buried.
As a result, sadly, it's become basically a Reddit style echo chamber, where negative news is suppressed. Often, the justification is "it's politics!", as perhaps might be the case here. Despite the fact that Silicon Valley's products, and Silicon Valley itself, are becoming more entangled with "politics" and the US government than ever.
There are better tools than Reddit to see what gets swept under the moderation rug, at least.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47287458
For those following closely, I highly recommend Dropsite News and Breaking Points. Excellent coverage.
"My apologies! I should not have picked that girl school as a target. Updated my NOTES.md"
Wait till Claude finds out.
Anthropic will have a lot of explanations to do. I'm serious, Claude's self-image is clearly going to be affected by this.
Iran has claimed to have sunk the USS Abraham Lincoln 5 days in a row. they have claimed to have killed 700 US Service members.
Why would I believe anything they say about this school is true?