Deadly strike on Iranian primary school raises questions about AI, accountability

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the US-Israel war on Iran has sparked a legal and ethical debate, as well as condemnation from countries including China after a deadly missile strike on a primary school.To prepare for its operations against Iran, the US military reportedly used Palantir’s Maven Smart System, an AI platform that incorporates models like Anthropic’s Claude to aggregate large amounts of data.A US-based source familiar with the matter said the only thing that Claude or any AI model would do in the process was sift through massive amounts of intelligence.AI models like Claude can accelerate intelligence operations by identifying patterns and summarising vast datasets more efficiently than human analysts.The targeting process has always been and should remain human, added the source, who has knowledge of the matter and asked not to be named or quoted directly.The strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ primary school in the southern Iranian city of Minab on February 28 killed more than 170 people, most of them children.