7 ms·
Claude helped select targets for Iran strikes, possibly including school
- abdelhousni 8mo agoGaza as a defining standard for war crimes and state terrorism : https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/ https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-cal...
- gnabgib 8mo agoDiscussion (34 points, 2 days ago, 34 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286236
- evil-olive 8mo agodirect link to the Substack post (instead of a Twitter post linking to it): https://www.nonzero.org/p/iran-and-the-immorality-of-openai https://www.nonzero.org/p/iran-and-the-immorality-of-openai
- DoctorOetker 8mo agoThat must be one of the most biased analyses on Iran I have read.
- throw310822 8mo agoOr maybe one of the less biased?
- DoctorOetker 8mo agoAll the horrible practices employed by the regime of Iran, used to happen in western European countries as well: - hostage politics: in medieval times, royal families of different kingdoms would exchange family members to live with the other royal family, as a form of hostage politics, supposedly this would prevent or discourage wars. The current regime in Iran rose to power how? by taking hostages. How have they repeatedly responded to spontaneous internal domestic forces towards regime change? Hostage politics. Every time they feel threatened they take hostages in some form or another: by taking a protestor hostage into some torture prison, they are keeping their relatives in line ("behave or your niece will have a bad day in infamous prison X"), it goes both ways they also keep the "free" relatives hostage by threatening say a protestor to harm their families if they don't pretend everything is fine. It's not just internal freedom of speech. I write from Belgium, when the protests surrounding Mahsa Amini's death occured, and the video of her collapse was released it even affected my freedom of speech: from the video it was clear they used hydrogen cyanide, but would I be allowed to share this on international media when "Free" nations are desperately trying to negotiate back their citizens taken hostage by the regime in Iran? - The wrongs and mistakes made in say Europe during WW1 (lobbing chemicals at each other), were just repeated without learning lessons by Iran. They are a signatory to the chemical weapons ban treaty. Yet the Mahsa Amini video (which even aired on local Iranian national television) subtly leaks the information that she was killed with hydrogen cyanide. There is no valid defense of the IRGC and the Iranian regime.
- genxy 8mo agoWait till Claude finds out.
- throw310822 8mo agoAnthropic will have a lot of explanations to do. I'm serious, Claude's self-image is clearly going to be affected by this.
- ed_mercer 8mo ago"My apologies! I should not have picked that girl school as a target. Updated my NOTES.md"
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- esperent 8mo agoActual article, rather than Twitter link: https://www.nonzero.org/p/iran-and-the-immorality-of-openai 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/anthropic-ai-iran-campaign/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthrop... (Non paywall: https://archive.is/bOJkE 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.
- defrost 8mo ago> 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. Absolutely. A real issue here is the normalizing of "AI scapegoating". The real failure? Not following through on human verification of a "strong lead". The Iran school site absolutely was _once_ a target, in the distant past - it's sited on and within a former Iranian Guard post with airstrip, etc. The part that needed strong checking was "history since last identified as a target" - and that site has a history of disrepair and abandonment. The debatable issue was whether the larger site did indeed store significant military assets underground, etc. which was entirely possible.
- gexla 8mo agoDidn't read the articles, but at least the planners know and understand a map. SO... a map is static reference. A calculator is deterministic computation. An LLM is probabilistic generation In high-stakes environments like military planning, tools that generate new claims rather than reference known data introduce a different class of risk. Yes, everyone is responsible for their own decisions. But then circle back to risk. How can the planners be sure they aren't dealing with hallucinations, questionable data, differing outputs based on prompts, and a long list of other things...
- cyrusradfar 8mo agoWhether 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.
- floralhangnail 8mo ago"A Computer Can Never Be Held Accountable Therefore a Computer Must Never Make a Management Decision"
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 8mo agoI mean, the problem is whoever follow the suggestion without double checking
- angry_octet 8mo ago[flagged]
- orwin 8mo ago> The only ROE they follow with any consistency is "Don't shoot Jews". Except Arabic or Ethiopian Jews. They have a bit of leeway that way.
- selimthegrim 8mo agoAnd hostages coming towards you with their hands up speaking Hebrew.
- razster 8mo agoI bet there is some moronic explanation. I have no doubt at this point and how things are going.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- trollbridge 8mo agoReminder that the very first computer was built for computing artillery tables. Technology has generally been driven by war, and now is no different.
- hackable_sand 8mo agoIt wasn't
- trollbridge 8mo agoIt was built to compute artillery tables. Its first actual use ended up being hydrogen-bomb calculations. (I'm referring of course to ENIAC.)
- skybrian 8mo agoThere 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/anthropic-ai-iran-campaign/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthrop...
- tantalor 8mo agoUnfortunately, WaPo has lost credibility for this type of reporting
- skybrian 8mo agoMaybe, but on any given subject, most of us haven't done any investigation at all. An article written by actual journalists based on what sources tell them beats whatever our uninformed opinions are on the subject.
- rkagerer 8mo agohttps://archive.ph/bOJkE https://archive.ph/bOJkE
- whattheheckheck 8mo agoWithout fluff, where is the direct claim and evidence?
- Helloworldboy 8mo agoIran has claimed to have sunk the USS Abraham Lincoln 5 days in a row. they have claimed to have killed 700 US Service members. Why would I believe anything they say about this school is true?
- bhhaskin 8mo agoWhat 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.
- Cerium 8mo agoWhen you have a hammer as big as an LLM a lot of problems start to look like nails.
- esseph 8mo agoVolume vs accuracy "Maybe we break a couple eggs making this omelette!"
- tasuki 8mo agoWhere omelette?
- roncesvalles 8mo agoIt's basically an OSINT query tool.
- locallost 8mo agoOne possibility would be: when I look at the current administration, it's a bunch of bros that don't really know anything except how to succeed between other bros they spend time with, so they need Claude for anything that involves actually knowing something. It's a stretch because you would hope the army is not run by morons, but I would no longer bet that they didn't do this because Hegseth asked Claude and influenced the decision after discussing it over Signal with other bros. The culture is driven by the person in charge, who is also incompetent for anything that doesn't involve dealing with loans and still making out ok despite the bankruptcy.
- UncleMeat 8mo agoThe modern right wing is all in on AI tools, in part because of their particular beliefs about the nature of expertise and general humanity. We’ve seen AI tools used for tons and tons of inappropriate things over the last year. Reviewing research grants, aid programs, and regulations? Why not? Publishing propaganda on Twitter? Sure thing! Finding “fraud” in state benefits? Absolutely! There’s a belief amongst these people that AI tools are better than human judgement and represent an inevitable future where CEO kings operate the world. Why not also apply it to war?
- hexasquid 8mo agoTwo-faces' coin is responsible for his actions
- mrcwinn 8mo agoFor those following closely, I highly recommend Dropsite News and Breaking Points. Excellent coverage.
- mentalfist 8mo ago>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
- DiogenesKynikos 8mo agoBased on the US State Department cables that Wikileaks released all the way back in 2010, Russian fear of NATO expansion into Ukraine was not just a talking point. Internal State Department cables from the embassy in Moscow say that entire Russian security and political establishment viewed it as a critical national security threat. In particular, take a look at this cable: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW265_a.html https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW265_a.html. Here's an excerpt: > Ukraine and Georgia's NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face. There are warnings throughout the cable that Russia may decide to invade Ukraine over the issue of NATO enlargement. In other words, the claim that this is just a Russian talking point is itself just a talking point.
- mopsi 8mo agoBut it is a talking point. The cable simply shows an American diplomat who has swallowed the hook and reiterates how Russians want to be perceived as thinking. One of the main efforts of Russian diplomacy is to invite foreign dignitaries and representatives to Russia, surround them with "researchers" and "experts" working directly under Kremlin guidance, to create a false impression for guests of how "Russian experts" "really think". This creates so-called useful idiots who unknowingly become champions of Putin's regime, believing they possess some inside knowledge that others lack. The narrative shared in the cable is hilariously detached from reality to anyone who is intimately familiar with modern Russia. Putin, who lets OMON beat and sexually assault peacefully assembling (not even protesting!) Russians within sight of his office windows, is supposedly worried about the treatment of Russians abroad.
- cooloo 8mo agoNo evidence, low quality articlea. Meanwhile Iran regime bomb civilians all over the middle east
- simondotau 8mo agoLike 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.
- ChrisArchitect 8mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47287458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47287458
- Razengan 8mo agoWhy is this post flagged? There's been a lot of pro-Claude jerking on HN lately, but anything against it gets buried?
- ta_4304545 8mo agoStandard Hacker News is heavily "moderated" these days (if not by the mods themselves then by mobocracies misusing tools), which means that anything that falls outside the Happy Silicon Valley / Everything Is Good / Nothing Is Wrong narrative will get flagged and buried. As a result, sadly, it's become basically a Reddit style echo chamber, where negative news is suppressed. Often, the justification is "it's politics!", as perhaps might be the case here. Despite the fact that Silicon Valley's products, and Silicon Valley itself, are becoming more entangled with "politics" and the US government than ever. There are better tools than Reddit to see what gets swept under the moderation rug, at least.