Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said he does not know what role his company’s AI model Claude played in a missile strike that killed an estimated 120 children at an elementary school in Minab, Iran, on February 28. In an interview on Bloomberg’s The Circuit with Emily Chang, he described the strike as “a really terrible thing to happen” but said the use case did not violate Anthropic’s policies.
“We don’t have access to, we don’t know exactly how these models were used,” Amodei said. “The principle that we have established, and I think the principle that was obeyed here, is a human makes the final decision.”
How Claude fits into the kill chain
US Central Command is using an AI-assisted targeting platform called Maven Smart System, built by Palantir under a $1.3 billion Pentagon contract. The system uses Claude and other AI tools to generate targets, rank them by strategic importance, and help pair weapons to targets.
CENTCOM struck 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of operations against Iran and reportedly 13,000 by April 6, little more than a month after the campaign began. The scale and speed of that targeting is the point: Maven is designed to compress the time between identifying a target and striking it.
