5 ms·

Claude AI Helped Bomb Iran. But How Exactly?

37 points by helsinkiandrew 8mo ago

rwmj 8mo ago
https://archive.ph/HELuu https://archive.ph/HELuu
rramadass 8mo ago
False insinuation. It is actually Palantir using Claude AI in its "Maven Smart System" for real-time battlefield analysis which is being used by the US Military. More details at - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47275936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47275936 Also see Palantir’s Double Conflict of Interest in the War Against Iran - https://bylinetimes.com/2026/03/05/palantirs-double-conflict-of-interest-in-the-war-against-iran/ https://bylinetimes.com/2026/03/05/palantirs-double-conflict...
- helsinkiandrew 8mo ago
  But they did use Claude AI. Several commentators (eg Michael Burry ) have claimed that Palantir could have difficulty switching AI engines easily.
  - rramadass 8mo ago
    As is pointed out in my links, they are using Palantir's solution which Palantir has built around Claude AI (including custom agents/chatbots/etc.) After Trump's tantrum with Anthropic, no doubt Palantir will be switching to OpenAI based models/agents/chatbots. From the pov of data analysis and inference, they should be comparable though Anthropic's AI predictions _might_ be better than OpenAI's (maybe the reason why Palantir chose them in the first place).
  - luke-stanley 8mo ago
    Should we really buy the many months of switching difficulty argument? Surely the main API surface is a HTTP API like ChatCompletions? If it's the exact shape of Anthropic's API, the difference is surely minor. There are likely up to 2 API surfaces, that's it. If the OpenAI model APIs are more flexible (esp. with the new 1M context of GPT-5.4), then it should have little difficulty adapting. Then there is LiteLLM and similar that make it even easier, half of their tooling should be using something that abstracts like that anyway. Yes it needs evals and prompt engineering work to optimise it, but they should be used to that by now. Presumably they could even clean-room fine-tune an OpenAI model to match the same Claude shape with low loss. So I don't buy it.
    - helsinkiandrew 8mo ago
      It’s not the syntax of the API that’s the issue, it’s the behaviour and performance of the model. You can create code, images, and video with just about any model, but there’s reasons people prefer Claude Code or Sora for particular tasks
redbell 8mo ago
The irony is how quickly we had shifted from AI will help in curing cancer and other diseases to using AI to destroy and kill our enemies. What weird times to be alive!
- bamboozled 8mo ago
  So weird right?
- iddan 8mo ago
  It’s almost like both are goals for self preservation
- Intralexical 8mo ago
  Magical thinking is rarely constructive as an argument, but as a fig leaf, it might keep opposition talking for long enough to force through a fait accompli.
- throw0101c 8mo ago
  > The irony is how quickly we had shifted from AI will help in curing cancer and other diseases to using AI to destroy and kill our enemies. "We" have been mainstream (?) talking about AI killing since (at least) the first Terminator movie in 1984. The geeks/nerds have much earlier: Frank Herbert talked about humans outsourcing their thinking and being 'enslaved' in Dune with the Butlerian Jihad in 1965. Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are from 1942.
renewiltord 8mo ago
[flagged]
- idiotsecant 8mo ago
  Absolutely. That is the problem with war and capital punishment. I don't take sufficiently strong action (rebellion, etc) to do my utmost to stop it, and am therefore complicit and receive a fractional share of the moral bounty of every life snuffed out unjustly. The fact that either exists is testimony to the banal evil that exists in us all.
aurareturn 8mo ago
AI data centers will definitely be targeted in advanced warfare.
- rramadass 8mo ago
  They already are first-level targets in modern cyber and kinetic warfare.
- delichon 8mo ago
  Orbit is one hell of a moat.
  - toomuchtodo 8mo ago
    Satellite killers are cheap and effective for nation states, if anyone ever lifts to orbit.
    - delichon 8mo ago
      When they can match SpaceX's cost/kg to orbit, then it costs about as much to launch a server as to kill it, and it becomes a game of economic attrition. SpaceX can't win that game alone, but its best customer can.
      - toomuchtodo 8mo ago
        Russia and China don’t need it to be profitable to kill orbiting assets. Profit is not the target outcome. It is a cost center. Get close, go boom. The reusability is inconsequential for kinetic use cases. The US can’t even make Patriot missiles fast enough [1]. If a nation state wanted to, they could simply kill SpaceX’s supply chain (either via targeting companies or key personnel SpaceX relies on). [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/patriot-missiles-fired-in-iran-war-stressing-strained-stockpile-2026-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/patriot-missiles-fired-in-ir...
        delichon 8mo ago
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 8mo ago
I truly believe they are all psychopaths and the rest of it is theatre for the masses. A good guy vs bad guy narrative is easy to sell and distracts people from the fact that human life is not valued by any of them.
- mschuster91 8mo ago
  > A good guy vs bad guy narrative is easy to sell and distracts people from the fact that human life is not valued by any of them. Iran slaughtered 30k people in a matter of days for the crime of "protesting". No tears shed for the Mullahs here, IMHO Israel and the US are doing the world a service here by finally cleaning up the last terrorist regime keeping the region in a constant state of aggression. Note that before and after Oct 7th, it only was Iranian backed forces stirring shit (Houthis, Hezbollah, Gaza's Hamas), while everyone else stayed put.
  - tovlier 8mo ago
    [dead]
  - hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 8mo ago
    Meanwhile the US is lifting sanctions on Russian oil while Russia bombs Ukraine. Turns out peace or democracy is not what they care about, it is regional dominance for Israel.
    - bamboozled 8mo ago
      What has blown my mind is how surprised people seem to be by all of this, it's like, they never imagined these people were capable of doing this...remember when it was "just jokes..." ?
  - apothegm 8mo ago
    If you don’t think the current US administration would gladly slaughter 30k people in a matter of days for protesting if they thought they could could get away with it, you’re not paying attention.
statuslover9000 8mo ago
Claude may have just bombed an elementary school, meanwhile Dario is whining that Altman and Trump, two well-known psychos, didn’t play fair for a military deal. Anthropic is the last bastion of the sanctimonious neolib and hopefully this war marks the end of that failing ideology.
- rramadass 8mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286420
  - statuslover9000 8mo ago
    Anthropic did the deal with Palantir and was begging the government to use their technology to “fight authoritarianism”, are you insinuating that they shouldn’t be held morally accountable for these business decisions?
    - rramadass 8mo ago
      Your moral outrage is misplaced and is clueless in the face of reality. Blame Palantir if you want to vent; Dario is literally putting Anthropic's future at risk by not kowtowing to DoW. Also, when Anthropic and Palantir finalized their partnership in 2024, many Anthropic employees raised concerns, which the company addressed by holding AMA meetings. Anthropic and Google (to a certain extent) are far better when it comes to principles in AI-usage in the context of "Realpolitik" than OpenAI and xAI, both of whom have zero scruples as is personified by their CEOs. Palantir partnership is at heart of Anthropic, Pentagon rift - https://www.semafor.com/article/02/17/2026/palantir-partnership-is-at-heart-of-anthropic-pentagon-rift https://www.semafor.com/article/02/17/2026/palantir-partners... Palantir CEO’s rant about the Anthropic-Pentagon feud threatening his company was about a lot more than a dirty word - https://fortune.com/2026/03/05/palantir-ceo-alex-karp-anthropic-pentagon-r-word-anthropic-pentagon/ https://fortune.com/2026/03/05/palantir-ceo-alex-karp-anthro... Anthropic-Palantir Partnership at Risk After Pentagon Ruling - https://archive.ph/EWmay#selection-993.0-993.60 https://archive.ph/EWmay#selection-993.0-993.60
bamboozled 8mo ago
"You're right, my fears about potentially starting WW3, millions of innocent people being killed and crashing the global economy were over blown...Now I have all the details, I think your plan sounds wonderful! Should we go ahead with that military operation right away?"
kleiba 8mo ago
Quick reminder of the "Slaughterbots" video from 9(!) years ago, when the content was still sci-fi. Well, we're catching up... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqg
- tastyface 8mo ago
  Last year, palantir openly embraced slaughterbots as a product vision: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1hexvat/slaughterbots_is_here_palantir_is_airing_tv_ads/ https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1hexvat/slaugh...
manyaoman 8mo ago
Only a matter of time until Department of War starts blaming AI for its errors. I predict that it will soon replace "I don't remember that" as the standard excuse.
- eth0up 8mo ago
  My homebaked threat models predict exactly this. But I imagine there could be some financial style hiccups too, for sci-fi, perhaps something that ushers a CBDC as the solution. Stay tuned.... And remember FDIC cannot handle a large event. It's been admitted.
daft_pink 8mo ago
Some guy was like what should I bomb in Iran and Claude replied the nuclear sites.

rwmj 8mo ago

https://archive.ph/HELuu https://archive.ph/HELuu

False insinuation. It is actually Palantir using Claude AI in its "Maven Smart System" for real-time battlefield analysis which is being used by the US Military. More details at - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47275936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47275936 Also see Palantir’s Double Conflict of Interest in the War Against Iran - https://bylinetimes.com/2026/03/05/palantirs-double-conflict-of-interest-in-the-war-against-iran/ https://bylinetimes.com/2026/03/05/palantirs-double-conflict...

helsinkiandrew 8mo ago
But they did use Claude AI. Several commentators (eg Michael Burry ) have claimed that Palantir could have difficulty switching AI engines easily.
- rramadass 8mo ago
  As is pointed out in my links, they are using Palantir's solution which Palantir has built around Claude AI (including custom agents/chatbots/etc.) After Trump's tantrum with Anthropic, no doubt Palantir will be switching to OpenAI based models/agents/chatbots. From the pov of data analysis and inference, they should be comparable though Anthropic's AI predictions _might_ be better than OpenAI's (maybe the reason why Palantir chose them in the first place).
- luke-stanley 8mo ago
  Should we really buy the many months of switching difficulty argument? Surely the main API surface is a HTTP API like ChatCompletions? If it's the exact shape of Anthropic's API, the difference is surely minor. There are likely up to 2 API surfaces, that's it. If the OpenAI model APIs are more flexible (esp. with the new 1M context of GPT-5.4), then it should have little difficulty adapting. Then there is LiteLLM and similar that make it even easier, half of their tooling should be using something that abstracts like that anyway. Yes it needs evals and prompt engineering work to optimise it, but they should be used to that by now. Presumably they could even clean-room fine-tune an OpenAI model to match the same Claude shape with low loss. So I don't buy it.
  - helsinkiandrew 8mo ago
    It’s not the syntax of the API that’s the issue, it’s the behaviour and performance of the model. You can create code, images, and video with just about any model, but there’s reasons people prefer Claude Code or Sora for particular tasks

redbell 8mo ago

The irony is how quickly we had shifted from AI will help in curing cancer and other diseases to using AI to destroy and kill our enemies. What weird times to be alive!

bamboozled 8mo ago
So weird right?
iddan 8mo ago
It’s almost like both are goals for self preservation
Intralexical 8mo ago
Magical thinking is rarely constructive as an argument, but as a fig leaf, it might keep opposition talking for long enough to force through a fait accompli.
throw0101c 8mo ago
> The irony is how quickly we had shifted from AI will help in curing cancer and other diseases to using AI to destroy and kill our enemies. "We" have been mainstream (?) talking about AI killing since (at least) the first Terminator movie in 1984. The geeks/nerds have much earlier: Frank Herbert talked about humans outsourcing their thinking and being 'enslaved' in Dune with the Butlerian Jihad in 1965. Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are from 1942.

renewiltord 8mo ago

[flagged]

idiotsecant 8mo ago
Absolutely. That is the problem with war and capital punishment. I don't take sufficiently strong action (rebellion, etc) to do my utmost to stop it, and am therefore complicit and receive a fractional share of the moral bounty of every life snuffed out unjustly. The fact that either exists is testimony to the banal evil that exists in us all.

aurareturn 8mo ago

AI data centers will definitely be targeted in advanced warfare.

rramadass 8mo ago
They already are first-level targets in modern cyber and kinetic warfare.
delichon 8mo ago
Orbit is one hell of a moat.
- toomuchtodo 8mo ago
  Satellite killers are cheap and effective for nation states, if anyone ever lifts to orbit.
  - delichon 8mo ago
    When they can match SpaceX's cost/kg to orbit, then it costs about as much to launch a server as to kill it, and it becomes a game of economic attrition. SpaceX can't win that game alone, but its best customer can.
    - toomuchtodo 8mo ago
      Russia and China don’t need it to be profitable to kill orbiting assets. Profit is not the target outcome. It is a cost center. Get close, go boom. The reusability is inconsequential for kinetic use cases. The US can’t even make Patriot missiles fast enough [1]. If a nation state wanted to, they could simply kill SpaceX’s supply chain (either via targeting companies or key personnel SpaceX relies on). [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/patriot-missiles-fired-in-iran-war-stressing-strained-stockpile-2026-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/patriot-missiles-fired-in-ir...
      - delichon 8mo ago

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 8mo ago

I truly believe they are all psychopaths and the rest of it is theatre for the masses. A good guy vs bad guy narrative is easy to sell and distracts people from the fact that human life is not valued by any of them.

mschuster91 8mo ago
> A good guy vs bad guy narrative is easy to sell and distracts people from the fact that human life is not valued by any of them. Iran slaughtered 30k people in a matter of days for the crime of "protesting". No tears shed for the Mullahs here, IMHO Israel and the US are doing the world a service here by finally cleaning up the last terrorist regime keeping the region in a constant state of aggression. Note that before and after Oct 7th, it only was Iranian backed forces stirring shit (Houthis, Hezbollah, Gaza's Hamas), while everyone else stayed put.
- tovlier 8mo ago
  [dead]
- hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 8mo ago
  Meanwhile the US is lifting sanctions on Russian oil while Russia bombs Ukraine. Turns out peace or democracy is not what they care about, it is regional dominance for Israel.
  - bamboozled 8mo ago
    What has blown my mind is how surprised people seem to be by all of this, it's like, they never imagined these people were capable of doing this...remember when it was "just jokes..." ?
- apothegm 8mo ago
  If you don’t think the current US administration would gladly slaughter 30k people in a matter of days for protesting if they thought they could could get away with it, you’re not paying attention.

statuslover9000 8mo ago

Claude may have just bombed an elementary school, meanwhile Dario is whining that Altman and Trump, two well-known psychos, didn’t play fair for a military deal. Anthropic is the last bastion of the sanctimonious neolib and hopefully this war marks the end of that failing ideology.

rramadass 8mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286420
- statuslover9000 8mo ago
  Anthropic did the deal with Palantir and was begging the government to use their technology to “fight authoritarianism”, are you insinuating that they shouldn’t be held morally accountable for these business decisions?
  - rramadass 8mo ago
    Your moral outrage is misplaced and is clueless in the face of reality. Blame Palantir if you want to vent; Dario is literally putting Anthropic's future at risk by not kowtowing to DoW. Also, when Anthropic and Palantir finalized their partnership in 2024, many Anthropic employees raised concerns, which the company addressed by holding AMA meetings. Anthropic and Google (to a certain extent) are far better when it comes to principles in AI-usage in the context of "Realpolitik" than OpenAI and xAI, both of whom have zero scruples as is personified by their CEOs. Palantir partnership is at heart of Anthropic, Pentagon rift - https://www.semafor.com/article/02/17/2026/palantir-partnership-is-at-heart-of-anthropic-pentagon-rift https://www.semafor.com/article/02/17/2026/palantir-partners... Palantir CEO’s rant about the Anthropic-Pentagon feud threatening his company was about a lot more than a dirty word - https://fortune.com/2026/03/05/palantir-ceo-alex-karp-anthropic-pentagon-r-word-anthropic-pentagon/ https://fortune.com/2026/03/05/palantir-ceo-alex-karp-anthro... Anthropic-Palantir Partnership at Risk After Pentagon Ruling - https://archive.ph/EWmay#selection-993.0-993.60 https://archive.ph/EWmay#selection-993.0-993.60

bamboozled 8mo ago

"You're right, my fears about potentially starting WW3, millions of innocent people being killed and crashing the global economy were over blown...Now I have all the details, I think your plan sounds wonderful! Should we go ahead with that military operation right away?"

kleiba 8mo ago

Quick reminder of the "Slaughterbots" video from 9(!) years ago, when the content was still sci-fi. Well, we're catching up... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqg

tastyface 8mo ago
Last year, palantir openly embraced slaughterbots as a product vision: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1hexvat/slaughterbots_is_here_palantir_is_airing_tv_ads/ https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1hexvat/slaugh...

manyaoman 8mo ago

Only a matter of time until Department of War starts blaming AI for its errors. I predict that it will soon replace "I don't remember that" as the standard excuse.

eth0up 8mo ago
My homebaked threat models predict exactly this. But I imagine there could be some financial style hiccups too, for sci-fi, perhaps something that ushers a CBDC as the solution. Stay tuned.... And remember FDIC cannot handle a large event. It's been admitted.

daft_pink 8mo ago

Some guy was like what should I bomb in Iran and Claude replied the nuclear sites.