The Tomahawk strike on Minab elementary killed nearly 160 people, mostly children, on the first day of the war on Iran
The use of AI in the US strike on a girls’ elementary school in Iran that killed nearly 160 people, mostly children, did not violate Anthropic’s ‘red lines,’ CEO Dario Amodei has said.
US forces struck the school in Minab with a Tomahawk missile on the first day of the war on Iran in February. The institution was reportedly targeted based on outdated data used by Palantir’s analysis and surveillance software, which incorporates Anthropic’s Claude AI.
In an interview with Bloomberg published on Wednesday, Amodei was asked whether his firm’s AI had played a role in the deadly attack.
“We don’t know exactly how these models were used… and what you’re talking about is a use case that doesn’t even violate our red lines,” he said.
While AI assists the military, “a human made that final call,” he added, stressing that Anthropic opposes entirely autonomous weapons and decision-making systems.
The US military has admitted to actively using Palantir – named after the elven scrying orbs corrupted by Sauron in Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ – to pick targets in the war on Iran.
Last month, the Pentagon announced that it had inked deals with top US AI companies, including Google, Amazon Web Services, SpaceX, OpenAI, NVIDIA and Microsoft. Just weeks earlier, Palantir CEO Alex Karp proclaimed a “new era” of AI-enabled US military supremacy.
According to Google whistleblower and Palantir insider Zach Vorhies, AI giants’ defense of surveillance and the use of AI in warfare is a “catch-22.”
“It’s like, ‘hey, look, if we… get very accurate data of your country, then we won’t bomb a school for girls,’” he told RT on Thursday, while discussing reports that data secretly harvested from Pokemon Go players over many years was likely used to enhance US military mapping capabilities.
“The way that they’re framing this in that if they don’t have good information, they’re just going to have collateral damage,” Vorhies said, warning that US AI giants are pushing to be increasingly deregulated in pursuit of a military advantage.
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