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?

This is wild guess. I'm working with GIS and Claude has proven to be extremely savvy. I can see operators throwing hundreds of layers and coming back with a "there a possible military installation here". Same tech that is used to find unregulated pools, or measuring the density of parking lots, or Nazca lines, but much more on demand for specific purposes.

Just to clarify, I don't condone the use of AI for guessing targets, but I think that's what may be going on here.

Throw Claude - or any other very good LLM - a bunch of data and it'll give results in seconds/minutes. Very similar to how sometimes when I run into a stubborn bug, I use a tracer to capture everything that's happening. Before, it'd take me sometimes hours and several scans before I find the issue, and maybe a bit more time to fix it depending on the severity. Now I just throw that full trace at Claude, and so far, 100% of the time it finds and resolves the issue in a few seconds. If the problem/question can be fixed/answered by what's in the given data, I've found Claude to be very good at finding it. And if you haven't given it the data, it's also very good at hypothesizing and telling you where+how to get relevant data so it can prove its hypothesis.

Not much different from giving it a bunch of satellite, traffic, etc data of a target and asking it to find areas to prioritize based on movement of particular personnel/equipment, etc.

I am guessing this is the case where a pre created narrative ("Killing AI bots") is force fitted into a more nuanced instance of reality. These are probably analysts that use Claude that has an MCP server to some palantir half-assed intelligence product. This is then pushed by non-technical journalists as some doomsday immoral non-human killing machine.

This is similar to the story behind Cambridge Analytica, which was essentially a company using crapware facebook API software to harvest voters data, but the media version of it was "tech companies can change election results" which echoed a season plotline of House of Cards (and older narratives of shadow forces)

My guess is to keep the US economy going.

Google for The Atlantic Dexter Filkins article on targeting with AI.

You have 1000 launches going off from Iran in 24 hour period. Do you have hundreds of people look at pixels of prUmpt the AI to track it back to sources?