Palantir and Anthropic AI helped the US hit 1k Iran targets in 24 hours

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.

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.

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?