Now over half a year into the United States’ war on Iran, it’s becoming abundantly clear that AI has been instrumental to the American campaign.
On the home front, AI and its infrastructure is quietly shaping the ideological battlefield: President Donald Trump is spewing out wartime propaganda slopped together by generative AI, as US-owned data centers and tech company offices become widely accepted as military targets.
AI is also proving instrumental for helping US Central Command choose targets for obliteration via drone strikes or missiles — so much so that an AI system played a pivotal role in perpetuating an American war crime.
According to new reporting by Bloomberg, the Pentagon’s investigation into the February 28th air strikes on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school — a double-tap strike which killed over 150 people, including at least 123 children — concluded that the attack was the result of outdated intelligence and over-reliance on an AI targeting system.
Interviewed by Bloomberg, anonymous military investigators involved in the probe characterized the horrifying attack as the result of a series of small “errors,” rather than one ill-fated mistake. Those errors, stemming from dusty intel, seem to have been compounded by the involvement of an as-yet unidentified AI targeting system, likely similar to the one used by American military officers to fast-track air strikes on over 2,000 Iranian targets within a four-day window in the early days of the conflict.
The latest info directly refutes president Donald Trump’s own narrative around the deadly incident. In July, Trump downplayed the United States’ responsibility for the attack, even suggesting that images and footage of the massacre could have been generated by AI. Yet as a UN fact-finding commission wrote in its report last week, there are “reasonable grounds” to conclude the US attacks amount to “war crimes” — the girls’ school attack being just one prominent example.
Whether the full Pentagon investigation will ever be made available to the public is unclear. What is certain is that killer AI is already here — and it doesn’t need to be sentient to help humans claim hundreds of innocent lives.
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