There've already been numerous postmortems published about what happened with the school strike.

The school was located on a former military base. 10 years ago, that location was a legit military target. Nobody bothered to update the satellite imagery from 2013 when feeding it into whatever LLM was assisting in targeting. It saw an airstrip and missile base. The human reviewing the targeting saw an airstrip and missile base. When you go to take out a military target, you don't send one missile. You send a missile or two in first, and then another couple in a few minutes later.

Hanlon's Razor very much applies here. There's no need to posit that the children were IRGC members or that the attack was deliberate or even that the children were the targets. There's a very obvious explanation, which is that nobody bothered to check the date and assumed that if it was military base in 2013 it was still a military base today.

It would make sense, but minutes later? Did the IRGC brass break out the infamous FTL dirtbikes?

you are way to forgivining in how stupid the military is under current leadership.

This sounds like the same type of Israel apologism. "OK, well we kill a bunch of innocents, but they were related to all those evil people"

We know AI has been used to do target planning: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthrop...

It is a quote from a future history book. And it may well be written like that, or some light paraphrase.

It is exactly what happened.

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The law of war is an attempt to have belligerent nations voluntarily set some limits on how far they’ll go when in conflict, in the hopes that the number of non-combatant casualties is reduced. That said, the answer to your question is that a nation that tries to follow the law of war has procedures in place to catch errors like bad intel. That is what a court would adjudicate.

Well, on the civilian side that's exactly what's happening with openai hacking other companies, so I guess it stands to reason that the military wants to get in on that too.

> Does a horrific war crime like My Lai[0] get scrutinized and investigated

Of course scrutiny and investigations are better than nothing - but keep in mind in My Lai - all the charges were eventually dropped except for one guy (Calley), who in the end got 3 years of house arrest.

> gives the military a way to cover

it's not like they didn't just sweep crap under the rug before AI.

did Colin Powell go to jail for lying to the UN? of course not. did Colin Powell go to jail for smuggling anthrax into a UN meeting? of course not. he just blamed it on "being misled by bad intelligence". Did anyone go to jail for that bad intelligence? of course not.

But we had to pay through the nose for decades of this shit in Iraq and Afghanistan (hundreds of billions), all for absolutely nothing. Did anyone even explain why the fuck, or was held responsible? of course not. They don't need AI to just ignore shit.

AI does not actually cover anything. Just because OpenAI and Antropic act like "AI did it" is get out of jail card does not mean it is.

But USA wont prosecute own war crimes unless forced to, regardless of AI.

> AI gives the military a way to cover or deflect war crimes

Huh? Who is accepting “it was AI” as cover for war crimes?

> Does a horrific war crime like My Lai[0] get scrutinized and investigated in 2026 or do people just say "eh maybe AI gave them bad intel" and ignore it?

Of course it does. The girl’s school bombing and strikes on fishermen are scrutinized. Why wouldn’t any atrocity?

We do not suffer from a lack of scrutiny. We suffer from a lack of accountability. AI is only tangential.

It might not happen, but it's already passed the house and has support in the senate.

Maybe the victor will be whoever doesn't fall into the trap of believing that a next word predictor optimized through RLHF to sound convincing to the average human [1] is in any way intelligent, and restructuring their entire economy and military around doing whatever the magic oracle machine says.

If the entire "free world" goes all-in, the history books will likely be written by Iran, Russia and North Korea.

[1] possibly to the point of presenting a superstimulus that bypasses any facilities for critical thinking. This might be easier to solve than many other problems that are used for evaluating A"I" performance, and very likely doesn't require genuine intelligence, just brute-force search + evolution

AI's power and water requirements are at odds with what is required to address climate change, so it really isn't a given that it's either inevitable or a permanent addition to society.