Artificial intelligence killed 123 children in Iran

Two American missiles hit an elementary school in Iran, killing more than 150 people — including 123 children — on the first day of the war with Iran. However, a new Bloomberg survey cites US officials who participated in an internal Pentagon assessment (which has not been made public) and attribute the incident to “a sequence of avoidable failures, including overreliance on an artificial intelligence tool built by Palantir.”

According to officials who spoke to Bloomberg, some US Central Command executives relied too heavily on the artificial intelligence of the Maven Smart System — a data integration and targeting platform developed by Palantir to accelerate intelligence analysis and decision-making.

See more articles from iGuRu.gr when you search for news on Google.

iGuRu.gr preferred source

The Defense Department has reportedly made the software a cornerstone of military operations over the past year… Officials said some expected Maven to flag outdated records or inconsistencies in the information gathered about potential targets, although it is unclear why they believed the system would do so. The location of the elementary school in Minab had been incorrectly listed as an Revolutionary Guards installation due to outdated data and was entered into Maven along with other potential targets. The system then suggested it as a target for the first day of operations. The process of compiling a target list, which previously took hours, was now done in minutes.

A Palantir spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company “is not responsible for either the original data or the identification of deficiencies in the information” and that there is no evidence that its software was responsible for the incident. Two people with knowledge of Palantir’s contracts with the Pentagon said the government retains primary responsibility for the quality of information fed into Maven. After the hit, Palantir added features that “review the original information to identify factors that would rule out a target, as well as to flag inconsistencies and inaccuracies that may have escaped human review,” said a person familiar with the process. The new functionality has reportedly already identified some anomalies…

More than 1.000 Iranian targets were hit in the first 24 hours, and according to Bloomberg’s sources, that pace limited the time available for additional confirmations. At the same time, the personnel of the teams tasked with limiting civilian casualties at the U.S. Department of Defense had been reduced by about 90% in recent years, to fewer than 20 people. No members of those teams examined the site at Minab before the missiles were launched.

A separate investigation (pdf) conducted this week by the United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran concluded that there were reasonable grounds to believe that the United States committed the war crime of launching an indiscriminate attack.

newsbot

Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.