So will there be droves of people canceling their Claude subscription too?

None of these companies are clean and I think it’s hilarious HN and the rest of SV has been duped by Dario. He’s playing the game better than Sam is, imo. Nothing Dario has said has indicated he is regretful about their partnership with Palantir or any of the stuff they’ve done with the DoD in the past 2.5 years.

Edit: this Washington Post article seems to be the original source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthrop...

I'm really curious to understand why this was done and why it was necessary. I cannot imagine the AI was used to identify targets without any base information. ie, I imagine the military already had a list of targets and locations. How would the AI know from satellite imagery that something was a military target.

If that's the case, why did they need help selecting targets? I can only imagine that the military bases and targets are well known and well studied. What would they have actually needed AI assistance for?

Note that the headline isn't about how effective hitting those targets was, or how successful at achieving its aims the bombing campaign was.

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.

AI target-selection systems have become a loophole that removes the link between the decision-maker (who should bear responsibility within the military bureaucracy) and the actual action taken. Israel became the implementer of this model in Gaza (Palantir was most likely part of this system as well).

Let us recall what former Israeli Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi reportedly conveyed about a meeting with Netanyahu. The IDF said they had struck 1,400 targets, yet Netanyahu reportedly slammed the table and angrily asked why it wasn’t 5,000, and said “bomb everywhere and destroy the houses.”

For the military bureaucracy, the fact that AI can speculate or generate potential targets (which is entirely possible with LLM systems) becomes a convenient mechanism that, at least on paper, allows them to distance themselves from responsibility.

Now let’s look at the statements made by Anthropic and Hegseth:

https://www.anthropic.com/news/where-stand-department-war

https://x.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070

From Anthropic’s own statement, we hear that they have actually been quite closely partnered. In Hegseth’s tweet we see:

“Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service.”

This shows that Anthropic is still currently being actively used by the Department of War.

My view is that Anthropic and its investors eventually realized that the American war machine will use their technology in reckless ways, and that this will certainly create a massive PR disaster or, in an ideal world, even legal consequences. That realization likely pushed them to adopt what they now frame as a more “humanitarian” position. We have already seen incidents where roughly 180 children were killed due to faulty targeting, assuming and hoping it was not intentional.

Is that what targeted the school? Or was that intentional?

I’m guessing there won’t be a lot of Palmer Luckey fans among the commenters here

Even if you don't care about the needless human suffering the US has caused from this operation, this conflict threatens global stability because of oil supply disruptions, and if the US keeps this up it could get quite bad very quickly.

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?

Whoa, near the top of the front page, and then immediately pushed to the second page of hacker news. Yikes.

You are absolutely correct I shouldn’t have done that.

> According to the report, the AI tools are also used to evaluate the outcomes of strikes after they are initiated.

Can I get off this train, please?

There are not enough ethics courses being taught in schools and universities.

https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted

This article is a total overstatement designed to boost stock prices and none of the actual users can counter the claim because it would require revealing classified information.

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.

This is the AI we're using to kill people now, surely it won't make any mistakes or confidently target civilians on accident: https://youtube.com/shorts/WxbHtYzBnvo?si=xh4kda_DuNvHFx0L

The actual article says it helped with planning.

"You're totally right, that was a hospital not a terrorist hideaway! My mistake!"

But how? The models are thick as shit. They can regurgitate existing knowledge, but it’s not like Iran and its military installations are publicly documented. And you can’t trust any decision it makes if you feed it the information, because it just makes up answers. It has no actual intelligence.

How are they ensuring 0 hallucinations?

1k targets and a few hundred school girls.

People in the HN comments would rather wait for Iran to get nuclear weapons and detonate them on their neighbors than use AI to do surgical strikes on Iran to take out these programs.

Can we get a better source?

That website is broken on mobile and I can’t even scroll to see the source

I can’t be the only one who couldn’t see it on ff/safari

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If it has good enough capacity for the military it is very possible we are receiving dumbed down / nerfed versions of Claude.