Pentagon: Palantir AI Overreliance Led to Strike Killing 123 Iranian Children
A Pentagon review found that overreliance on Palantir's Maven Smart System contributed to a U.S. strike on an Iranian elementary school that killed at least 123 children. Outdated data, stale satellite imagery, and a 90% cut to civilian-harm mitigation teams compounded the error. Palantir denies responsibility, and the U.S. has not accepted blame.
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.
- simonsarris
Isn't the ratio of correct/incorrect targets in this offensive significantly better than historical average, for any aerial campaign waged by any country, ever? The US hit something like 13,000 targets so far in 2026. I's remarkable to hit so many targets at standoff distances and only get 1 wrong, and that 1 being a school that was wrapped by an L-shaped military complex. Has there ever been any war waged by any side that was 12,999:1 for this kind of thing?
In the GWOT years, under several administrations, there were all kinds of mistaken drone strikes (at least 8 wedding parties according to one source). A lot of these were done based on signatures, stuff that appeared military-like in the way the targets moved (eg, convoys). I would be very surprised if the current reliance on AI was not a strict improvement over that.
- legitster
> 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.
- jmathai
> The Minab site, which was cataloged as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facility due to outdated data, was fed into Maven with other candidates and came out as a recommended day-one target.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.
- macintux
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-...
- Zigurd
You're absolutely right, those were innocent children. I apologize for the error. Would you like to know more about war crimes?
- colingauvin
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.
- impossiblefork
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.
- Etiquette8790
Once a child murderers always a child murderers. They murdered million children in Iraq. Why this is even a surprise? American terrorists and American terrorism are biggest threat to the humanity.