> 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.

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't 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.

> 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.

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-...

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.

> The Minab site, which was cataloged as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facility due to outdated data, was fed into Maven with other candidates and came out as a recommended day-one target.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.

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

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

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

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.

Meanwhile, the Houthi's are trying to build missile technology with AI. We're only seeing the beginning of the consequences of an over-reliance on AI for military purposes.

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

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

Things that jumped out at me.

If true, there was no verification of the targets selected by AI, meaning AI is the final arbiter of the deadly use of force. Another Rubicon passed.

Trump pretends like it didn’t happen: “We might never know what really happened there” is a frustrating lack of responsibility.

Still missing, as it always is from all of these kinds of articles, is: How common is this error rate compared to pure human evaluation and decision-making? I’m not saying I support AI-assisted killing, but why is nobody comparing it to human failure rates? If the article is true, then there were 1,000 targets hit in the first 24 hours. If the majority of the legwork and selection was done by AI, how many schools, or equivalents, would one expect to be wrongly hit if all the targeting work were done by humans only?

A poor craftsman blames his tools.

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

Can't wait to read "Karp in Al-Quds: A Report on the Banality of Evil" in 2030.

a random musing:

I often see the argument "humans make mistakes too" when talking about AI, self driving cars, autonomous drones and such...

yes, they do, but most of the time they go to trial, there are consequences, there might even be justice.

when AI/self driving cars/drones make mistakes, which might very well be more rare in absolute [citation needed], there is (seems to me) a tendency to shrug it off, almost as if it were force majeure.

is it just me?

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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"

time to make Palantir the next Flock

France gave them the boot, you can too

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.

The one that pulls the trigger bears the responsibility.

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

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

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?

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

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.

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?

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

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.

Depressing, why should my tax dollars fund this incompetence and insanity. We need more accountability for such military decisions