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Palantir and Anthropic AI helped the US hit 1k Iran targets in 24 hours
- zppln 7mo ago> According to the report, the AI tools are also used to evaluate the outcomes of strikes after they are initiated. Can I get off this train, please?
- empath75 7mo ago1k targets and a few hundred school girls.
- talesfromearth 7mo agoI wonder what the people who cancelled their ChatGPT subscriptions and switched to Anthropic are thinking now. All these providers are the same.
- rustyhancock 7mo agoI'm convinced that Claude is being used to run hype train on HN. That's option A, option B is pure halo effect. I.e. Claude is so good that people misascribe positive attributes to Anthropic. Otherwise it really is mind boggling to see people laud Dario's posts which are tone blind to Europeans at least.
- ekjhgkejhgk 7mo agoI'm European and would like to know what you mean wrt to Europeans.
- rustyhancock 6mo agoHow much do you value Anthropic's stance that they want to contracttually block domestic mass surveillance of Americans? Versus OpenAI's stance that they want to block domestic mass surveillance of Americans with monitoring in the loop. Given you're not American and neither has any issues with mass surveillance anywhere else on the planet. Or that Anthropic sees itself as similar to the US Department of War.
- ekjhgkejhgk 7mo agoAnthropic objected to being used to build autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance. They didn't obejct to being used to hit schools in Iran. OpenAI didn't object to anything. They're all bad, but some are worse than others.
- Horos 6mo agowho believe here that saying no is possible ?
- aenis 7mo agoGood catch!
- SirensOfTitan 7mo agoYou're being downvoted, but if Anthropic is going to deploy Claude for decision making in target prosecution it is clearly a "Caesar's wife must be above suspicion" moment. Association with is guilt unless proven otherwise.
- jackmottatx 7mo ago[dead]
- qoez 7mo ago"You're totally right, that was a hospital not a terrorist hideaway! My mistake!"
- ghywertelling 7mo agoA police park was hit because it had the word "police" in it.
- MagicMoonlight 7mo ago“I have looked up the secret list of nuclear installations like you asked, and here they are:”
- bigcloud1299 7mo agoYou are absolutely correct I shouldn’t have done that.
- ModernMech 7mo agoHow are they ensuring 0 hallucinations?
- ben_w 7mo agoWhat makes you think they have ensured anything? Apart from anything else, Anthropic don't want to be used for this.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- nickthegreek 7mo ago> Apart from anything else, Anthropic don't want to be used for this what did they think a Palantir contract would be for?
- ben_w 6mo agoDoes it matter what they thought? Anthropic held to a set of T&Cs in a way that had the Pentagon making threats to render Anthropic a supply chain risk, Anthropic either didn't care or thought it was a bluff, it wasn't a bluff and they're now suing over being called a supply chain risk. It would have been a really weird hill to risk dying on if they didn't actually care. (Not that "this is weird" is still enough by itself to reach any conclusions, given that a lot of newsworthy decision making in the world right now is of a quality that it seems to have been done by a LLM, perhaps with as much human involvement as changing a font or typing "continue").
- michaelmrose 7mo agoThis is basically impossible. The answer is that the hallucinations probably led to mass deaths
- bschwindHN 7mo agoThere are not enough ethics courses being taught in schools and universities. https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- Obscurity4340 7mo agoPeter Thiel's degree was in philosophy
- Imustaskforhelp 7mo agoIf you ask me, its the job insecurity and the culture we have around in the sense of hustle culture where ethics are lost. My generation feels more replacable than ever and this leads to ethics being lost. Ethics can be diluted very easily if you make people wonder about food on the table. I am in school and ethics aren't an concern when we discuss and I am not sure treating it as a subject could help either. Perhaps but I do feel at some point, it has to have with people feeling a sense of job security. As a society as well, we have to probably do something to reward ethics. Especially when not following ethics sometimes leads to so much financial gains. To me, the way I see it, people sometimes start doing immoral things because they have to put food on the table and then greed takes over. But that being said, I am not sure how job insecurity/this culture can be fixed by a single measure but I just wanted to point out that there's more nuance to it. The only way to meaningfully solve is with having discussions on this topic and having actual change take place. We feel like we go grease ourselves in studies and try to get a job and even when we do but many of us are still not able to afford a house at times :<
- text0404 6mo agoI've witnessed plenty of derision towards liberal arts and humanities in the tech industry and here on HN. For some reason a lot of industry workers believe that STEM is all that matters and somehow their work exists wholly separate from its consequences and the context in which it was created.
- everdrive 7mo agoI'm really curious to understand why this was done and why it was necessary. I cannot imagine the AI was used to identify targets without any base information. ie, I imagine the military already had a list of targets and locations. How would the AI know from satellite imagery that something was a military target. If that's the case, why did they need help selecting targets? I can only imagine that the military bases and targets are well known and well studied. What would they have actually needed AI assistance for?
- yrter65 7mo agoGoogle for The Atlantic Dexter Filkins article on targeting with AI.
- aceazzameen 7mo agoMy guess is to keep the US economy going.
- boomskats 7mo agoYou mean the immediate personal macroeconomy of a very specific subset of the US political class?
- AndrewKemendo 7mo agoYes unfortunately that’s how the economy works
- ogig 7mo agoThis is wild guess. I'm working with GIS and Claude has proven to be extremely savvy. I can see operators throwing hundreds of layers and coming back with a "there a possible military installation here". Same tech that is used to find unregulated pools, or measuring the density of parking lots, or Nazca lines, but much more on demand for specific purposes. Just to clarify, I don't condone the use of AI for guessing targets, but I think that's what may be going on here.
- onlyrealcuzzo 7mo agoIs that what targeted the school? Or was that intentional?
- redwood 7mo ago[flagged]
- BoredPositron 7mo agoThe school was a seperate building so targeting or weapon precision was pretty sloppy. The shift toward war crime whataboutism is a new low for HN, capping off a week of aggressive warmongering and intellectualized cruelty in every comment thread about Iran.
- MagicMoonlight 7mo ago[flagged]
- BoredPositron 7mo agoCase in point.
- onlyrealcuzzo 7mo ago> It’s war. Isn't this a special operation?
- UncleMeat 7mo agoModern technology allows for precision that was impossible in WW2. Using civilian casualties in WW2 to justify them today is horrible. WW2 was a total war. This isn't even a war according to our laws. Even if we concluded that the firebombing was acceptable (and oodles of people call it a war crime), this does not transfer that justification to these attacks. I am also not terribly interested in using the evil acts of terrorist groups to justify our own evil acts. Would it be acceptable in your mind to behead captured Iranian PoWs because various terrorist groups do this? I would hope not.
- pmarreck 7mo agoThe actual article says it helped with planning.
- password54321 7mo agoIf it has good enough capacity for the military it is very possible we are receiving dumbed down / nerfed versions of Claude.
- pmarreck 7mo agoI’m guessing there won’t be a lot of Palmer Luckey fans among the commenters here
- 1123581321 7mo agoWhat does this mean? I know he has a weaponry startup, Anduril, that has some Palantir financial ties. But I don't see the connection in the article.
- y-curious 7mo agoI think they mean a general “anti war machine” sentiment in this forum. +1 to that sentiment from me, we are going quickly from “clean nuclear power” to “big bombs!”
- 1123581321 7mo agoI see. Thanks.
- qoez 7mo agoI'm actually a fan of his and on his side. But I also definitely do not believe these things are accurate enough to perform this kind of task yet.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- Robdel12 7mo agoSo will there be droves of people canceling their Claude subscription too? None of these companies are clean and I think it’s hilarious HN and the rest of SV has been duped by Dario. He’s playing the game better than Sam is, imo. Nothing Dario has said has indicated he is regretful about their partnership with Palantir or any of the stuff they’ve done with the DoD in the past 2.5 years. Edit: this Washington Post article seems to be the original source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthropic-ai-iran-campaign/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthrop...
- Trasmatta 7mo agoI remember considering applying for Anthropic about 1.5 years ago because they seemed like a somewhat more ethical AI company. Then I learned about their Palantir partnership and realized it was all just a clever marketing gimmick.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- surgical_fire 7mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit " Frankfurt determines that bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care whether what they say is true or false." This quote comes to mind whenever Dario Amodei opens his mouth.
- swed420 7mo ago> None of these companies are clean and I think it’s hilarious HN and the rest of SV has been duped by Dario. Exactly. Anthropic is to the rest of the AI companies as capital-loyal Democrats are to capital-loyal Republicans of the uniparty. The choices we are given are merely an illusion. The notion of "lesser of 2 etc evils" is fundamentally flawed.
- glob_roman 7mo ago[flagged]
- Trasmatta 7mo agoThis is the AI we're using to kill people now, surely it won't make any mistakes or confidently target civilians on accident: https://youtube.com/shorts/WxbHtYzBnvo?si=xh4kda_DuNvHFx0L https://youtube.com/shorts/WxbHtYzBnvo?si=xh4kda_DuNvHFx0L
- McDyver 7mo agoThey literally bombed a school full of girls. It's irrelevant whether AI "makes any mistakes" or not, there are no morals either way, and people just seem to be desensitised to all of this
- AndrewKemendo 7mo agoCan we get a better source? That website is broken on mobile and I can’t even scroll to see the source I can’t be the only one who couldn’t see it on ff/safari
- forgotTheLast 6mo agothe only thing I see is the cover picture and the 3 sentence "AI Powered Summary"
- MagicMoonlight 7mo agoBut how? The models are thick as shit. They can regurgitate existing knowledge, but it’s not like Iran and its military installations are publicly documented. And you can’t trust any decision it makes if you feed it the information, because it just makes up answers. It has no actual intelligence.
- xyzzy9563 7mo ago[flagged]
- catlover76 7mo ago[dead]
- UncleMeat 7mo agoSo surgical they've included a school and a boat 1000 miles away returning from international exercises.
- xyzzy9563 6mo agoThey didn't intentionally try to attack a school, and also they gave the crew of the ship a chance to evacuate.
- UncleMeat 6mo agoHow are either of these statements evidence that the strikes have been surgical? What you are saying here is that the US is not capable of only hitting the stuff it wants and that it hits stuff completely unrelated to nuclear capabilities or even the current theater but kindly provided notice before murdering people?
- xyzzy9563 6mo agothe school was an Iranian missile: https://x.com/angertab/status/2031005762395504647?s=20 https://x.com/angertab/status/2031005762395504647?s=20
- bhouston 7mo agoWhoa, near the top of the front page, and then immediately pushed to the second page of hacker news. Yikes.
- NitpickLawyer 7mo agoThis would be a really interesting topic to explore from a pure intellectual curiosity perspective. How/why/when this could be used, what could be the ramifications, do other entities also do this, would using a "dumber" but non "safety" aligned model work differently, etc. There are so many things to think about here. Unfortunately it seems that most of the commenters are going for the political / emotional jabs. Oh well.
- GolfPopper 7mo agoNote that the headline isn't about how effective hitting those targets was, or how successful at achieving its aims the bombing campaign was. They hit 1000 targets in 24 hours. And yet, a week later, the Iranian regime is intact, American allies are still under constant bombardment, interceptor stocks are running low, and half of America's long-range, high-altitude transportable radar have been destroyed. This looks like shooting the broad side of a barn, and then painting bullseyes around every bullet hole.
- parsimo2010 7mo agoThis article is a total overstatement designed to boost stock prices and none of the actual users can counter the claim because it would require revealing classified information. This is the same kind of claim you’ve all seen before about AI systems doing something amazing and it’s really just a bunch of people sitting in a call center in a third world country controlling the system remotely. Only in this case it’s a bunch of senior airmen and staff sergeants sitting in an intel shop doing all the work. Sure, Palantir made a UI but it just plain sucks. And Claude probably fixed some typos in the targeting packages. But let’s not believe that either system was influential to target selection. CENTCOM created a similar number of targets at the beginning of the Syrian civil war before any of these LLMs existed and it took a similar amount of time. We ended up not striking them, but the plans were made after Assad used chemical weapons. All the fixed locations in Iran had packages written and sitting on the shelf before Trump was even elected the first time. The AI in this war added basically no value. Any claim that Palantir did something useful for the government should immediately be viewed as suspect. I’ve used their software, and it sucks. I cannot understand how they got such big contracts to make a shitty UI that poorly integrates other systems’ data.
- trollbridge 7mo agoDo any end users actually use the Palantir AI? I've always assumed that the big customers of it would just put their own custom UI on it that was actually usable.
- throwaway613746 7mo ago[dead]
- gater733 7mo ago[dead]
- SirensOfTitan 7mo agoEven if you don't care about the needless human suffering the US has caused from this operation, this conflict threatens global stability because of oil supply disruptions, and if the US keeps this up it could get quite bad very quickly. I worked briefly in defense-tech and there is a huge blindspot in this field. While I worked with a ton of thoughtful, ethical, and talented people from the military, there is a veritable blind spot when it comes to support of the "warfighter." It is certainly noble and worthwhile work to protect soldiers from harm through technology, but I got some sense some people (actually especially the tech people who were never in the military) didn't think enough about the ethical concerns when dealing with people attached to the US's "enemies." And further, what about when the US itself is the aggressor? While active warfighters have to follow chain of command, companies can and should apply ethical constraints--but they often don't because DoD contracts are lucrative and (especially if you're not a prime) hard won. I've had a lot of fun playing with Claude 4.6, but it is entirely unacceptable that this technology is being used in this conflict with Iran. I will cancel my account once this month's subscription is up in 2 weeks. The US is the aggressor here, that is certain. Support of this conflict as a private company that supposedly is oriented toward ethics is extremely illuminating. Now with that, I have thought a tremendous amount about whether someone like Dario could even steer the ship away from support of a conflict like this at this point. We are all susceptible to market forces, and companies like Anthropic need as much revenue as possible to be able to maintain themselves and grow given the cost of training. There is certainly an argument to be made that if he did so, he might lose confidence of investors and lose control entirely. This begs the question: is shareholder/capital optimization the best way to organize our society?
- skeledrew 7mo ago> We are all susceptible to market forces, and companies like Anthropic need as much revenue as possible to be able to maintain themselves and grow given the cost of training. There's also the consideration that if they come across at too against US military support, the administration can and will make things extremely painful for them. I suspect they've actually gotten off pretty easy just being named a supply chain risk (so far). Imagine the backlash if they'd for example accepted contracts with China. Or even made so much as a hint that they weren't open to most military use cases.
- orsenthil 7mo agoThis is media in action. Confuse and gaslight folks so that they stand to accept people like Trump and Elon musk.
- serguzest 7mo agoAI target-selection systems have become a loophole that removes the link between the decision-maker (who should bear responsibility within the military bureaucracy) and the actual action taken. Israel became the implementer of this model in Gaza (Palantir was most likely part of this system as well). Let us recall what former Israeli Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi reportedly conveyed about a meeting with Netanyahu. The IDF said they had struck 1,400 targets, yet Netanyahu reportedly slammed the table and angrily asked why it wasn’t 5,000, and said “bomb everywhere and destroy the houses.” For the military bureaucracy, the fact that AI can speculate or generate potential targets (which is entirely possible with LLM systems) becomes a convenient mechanism that, at least on paper, allows them to distance themselves from responsibility. Now let’s look at the statements made by Anthropic and Hegseth: https://www.anthropic.com/news/where-stand-department-war https://www.anthropic.com/news/where-stand-department-war https://x.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070 https://x.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070 From Anthropic’s own statement, we hear that they have actually been quite closely partnered. In Hegseth’s tweet we see: “Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service.” This shows that Anthropic is still currently being actively used by the Department of War. My view is that Anthropic and its investors eventually realized that the American war machine will use their technology in reckless ways, and that this will certainly create a massive PR disaster or, in an ideal world, even legal consequences. That realization likely pushed them to adopt what they now frame as a more “humanitarian” position. We have already seen incidents where roughly 180 children were killed due to faulty targeting, assuming and hoping it was not intentional.
- ChrisArchitect 6mo agoEarlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47248385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47248385
- anupamchugh 6mo ago[flagged]