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...

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?

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.

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

Can I get off this train, please?

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?

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47248385

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.

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

There's also the consideration that if they come across at too against US military support, the administration can and will make things extremely painful for them. I suspect they've actually gotten off pretty easy just being named a supply chain risk (so far). Imagine the backlash if they'd for example accepted contracts with China. Or even made so much as a hint that they weren't open to most military use cases.

At one point I got curious about how the US military thinks about insurgencies, so I read their manual on how to fight them. As someone holding a lot of dissident views in the US it was pretty interesting.

One thing I took away was the feeling that at no time did the manual ever define what an "insurgent" is, beyond whoever the US government tells them the insurgents are.

So you have as situation where, ultimately, there's no external reality testing, and reality is simply whatever "reality" is as defined by the command structure.

I know that sounds overly simple- of course military follows a chain of command, unquestionable right up to its civilian commander in chief.

Why I feel that is a useful observation is that, to your question, people are constantly deferring their ethical judgements. And I suspect there is some cognitive bias in play that allows folks to feel that deferral can't happen across all these systems.

In the case of businesses, it is to "the market"-- which is reactive and as such doesn't have "judgement", and even if it did it's needs aren't "human" so relying on it as a human seems dangerous. So to your question, my answer is usually "probably not". And further, unless people stop deferring their judgments to the imaginary of the spectacular market, eventually shits gonna break.

In the case of the military, we can see what happens when radically nihilistic (pedophilic and sociopathic media personalities) are put at the helm.

My larger point, though, is that our usual assumption seems to be that all these other folks are likely to exercise their faculties to test out reality and hopefully, when it doesn't line up with that reality, push back and prevent dumb shit from happening.

But all these systems are set up to prevent that from happening, it doesn't seem at all strange to me that these systems are starting to break in the ways that the seem to be failing.