The US military used AI to pick thousands of targets but missed a note saying one was a school

used AI to pick thousands of targets but missed a note saying one was a school">

The probe into a missile strike on an Iranian school exposes serious gaps in the US military's targeting infrastructure. AI is supposed to close them.

A missed note from an intelligence analyst and systems that didn't talk to each other: according to a Los Angeles Times report, these are the two central failures investigators uncovered while looking into a missile strike on an Iranian school. The late-February attack killed an estimated 120 children. The strike took place during a war in which the US military, according to earlier reports , used AI at scale for target selection for the first time. Anthropic's Claude model was embedded in Palantir's Maven Smart System and suggested roughly 1,000 targets on day one.

Years before the strike, an analyst noticed changes at a site in the city of Minab in southeastern Iran. The US had previously classified the building as an Iranian military naval facility. By then, it had become an elementary school.

The analyst flagged the changes in 2019 using a digital intelligence tool, according to the LA Times. The critical problem was that the tool wasn't linked to the official target database the US military uses to develop strike targets. The information never reached commanders. The building was reviewed multiple times, but nobody updated the database. According to the New York Times, the imagery used was seven years old.

At least two intelligence databases have never been connected to the authoritative target database, the LA Times reports. In Syria, target data in the mid-2010s was sometimes 10 or 20 years old. At the center sits a database called MIDB, built in the 1980s, that still relies heavily on manual input. It's supposed to be replaced by an automated system called MARS, but the transition is years behind schedule. The US Government Accountability Office flagged long-standing deficiencies in the system back in 2020.

This aging infrastructure stands in stark contrast to the speed of AI elsewhere. A WSJ report put the number of targets hit in the first days at over 3,000 and warned that oversight mechanisms for human review of lethal decisions were underfunded. Even then, US investigators considered American forces likely responsible for the school strike, a conclusion the LA Times report now backs up with specific technical failures.

Some targeting experts hope that connecting digital systems and adding more AI will reduce errors going forward, the LA Times reports. An automated cross-check against public services like Google Maps could flag anomalies for human review. The Pentagon moved in exactly that direction after the report, unveiling an agentic AI initiative.