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Title: Pentagon Investigators Say Overreliance on Palantir AI Contributed to
US Strike That Killed 123 Iranian Children

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/09/22/0614...

Two U.S. missiles hit an elementary school in Iran, killing over 150 people
including 123 children on the first day of the Iran War. But Gizmodo notes
that a new Bloomberg investigation cites U.S. officials involved in an
unreleased internal Pentagon review who blame "a cascade of preventable
failures that included an overreliance on an AI tool built by Palantir."
According to the officials who spoke to Bloomberg, some personnel inside U.S.
Central Command leaned too hard on the AI inside the Maven Smart System, an
AI-powered data integration and targeting platform developed by Palantir to
accelerate intelligence analysis and decision-making. The Defense Department
has reportedly made the software tool a cornerstone of military operations
over the past year... Officials said some users expected Maven to flag stale
records or contradictions in the intelligence assembled for potential
targets, though it is not clear why they thought the system would do that.
The Minab [elementary school] site, which was cataloged as an Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps facility due to outdated data, was fed into Maven
with other candidates and came out as a recommended day-one target. Target-
list work that once took hours was condensed into minutes. A Palantir
spokesperson told Bloomberg the company "is not responsible for the
underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies" and that there is
no evidence its software was at fault. Two people familiar with Palantir's
Pentagon contracts said the government keeps primary responsibility for the
quality of the information that's fed into Maven. After the strike, Palantir
added features that "re-review underlying intelligence to identify factors
that would disqualify a target and flag inconsistencies and inaccuracies that
human review may have missed," a person familiar with the work said. That new
functionality is said to have already caught some anomalies... More than
1,000 Iranian targets were hit in the first 24 hours, and according to
Bloomberg's sources, that pace compressed the time available for additional
confirmations. Staffing on civilian harm mitigation teams across the U.S.
Department of Defense had also fallen by roughly 90% over recent years,
shrinking to fewer than 20 people overall. The U.S. Central Command's group
shrank from 10 people to one. No member of those teams reviewed the Minab
site before the missiles were up in the air. A separate inquiry by the United
Nations' Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran this week
reached the conclusion that there were reasonable grounds to believe the
United States committed the war crime of launching an indiscriminate attack.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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