Bloomberg: overreliance on Palantir's Maven SI system was one of the causes of the US strike on an Iranian school in which 123 children died
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Publication time restored from the build log. . Updated: .
SI is already shrinking military target selection from hours to minutes, and at that speed the cost of error is enormous if people stop checking what exactly the machine gave them.
Bloomberg's investigation draws on an unpublished internal Pentagon review: on the first day of the war with Iran in February, two Tomahawk missiles hit an elementary school in Minab, killing more than 150 people, at least 123 of them children. The review names a chain of errors: the site had been listed as military for years even though 2017-2018 satellite imagery showed a school; targeting that used to take hours was compressed to minutes with Maven amid more than 1,000 targets on the first day; the civilian harm mitigation team at CENTCOM had been cut from 10 people to one, and nobody rechecked the target. The military expected Maven itself to flag outdated data, though the system had no such function. Palantir said it is not responsible for the underlying intelligence and, after the strike, added a recheck of indicators that rule a target out.