AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying

A detailed analysis of the US strike on an Iranian school during Operation Epic Fury, arguing that media coverage wrongly blamed Claude (an LLM) while ignoring the real culprit: Palantir's Maven Smart System. Maven is a targeting platform built over years to compress the 'kill chain' — the process from detecting a target to striking it — down to 1,000 decisions per hour. The school was misclassified as a military facility in an outdated database, and the speed of the system left no room for anyone to catch the error. The piece traces a long history of how military targeting systems create 'circular reporting' and eliminate the human deliberation that catches mistakes, drawing on Vietnam's Operation Igloo White, the 2003 Iraq invasion, and Kosovo. It argues that LLMs are a 'charismatic technology' that distort public attention away from the real bureaucratic and political decisions that enabled the atrocity.