Claude helped select targets for Iran strikes, possibly including school

abdelhousni

Gaza as a defining standard for war crimes and state terrorism : https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-cal...

gnabgib

Discussion (34 points, 2 days ago, 34 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286236

evil-olive

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

genxy

Wait till Claude finds out.

ed_mercer

"My apologies! I should not have picked that girl school as a target. Updated my NOTES.md"

esperent

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.

cyrusradfar

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.

trollbridge

Reminder that the very first computer was built for computing artillery tables. Technology has generally been driven by war, and now is no different.

skybrian

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...

whattheheckheck

Without fluff, where is the direct claim and evidence?

bhhaskin

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.

hexasquid

Two-faces' coin is responsible for his actions

mrcwinn

For those following closely, I highly recommend Dropsite News and Breaking Points. Excellent coverage.

mentalfist

>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

cooloo

No evidence, low quality articlea. Meanwhile Iran regime bomb civilians all over the middle east

simondotau

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.