Bloomberg: US 'kill chain' with AI targeting killed 123 children after Pentagon gutted civilian harm review teams
Transformative AIThe attack killed more than 150 people, including at least 123 children, while a UN inquiry said it may have amounted to a war crime. In terms of child casualties, it is the deadliest American military targeting error of the 21st century. United Nations investigators said there were reasonable grounds to conclude that the strike on Minab and another US attack that took place on the same day amounted to war crimes. The United States has not publicly accepted responsibility, and President Donald Trump has previously suggested it was Tehran's fault.
According to officials who spoke to Bloomberg, the site had been catalogued in US intelligence databases as part of a military compound for years, even though construction of walls and separate entrances that cut the school off from the adjacent base appears to have been finished by 2017, and a 2018 image shows brightly painted walls, a soccer pitch, assembly rows, and playground markings. Bloomberg reported that one analyst had spotted changes as early as 2019 and logged remarks in a system that was not connected to the primary military intelligence database used for targeting, and those notes never reached the people who built the target list. As the campaign was prepared, US defence officials were tasked with identifying targets that would paralyse Iran's military before Tehran could respond, with the IRGC's naval division foremost on the list, and the Minab site, erroneously classified as an IRGC facility and fed into Maven, was made a primary target by the software. More than 1,000 Iranian targets were struck in the first 24 hours of the campaign, according to people familiar with the Pentagon's findings.
Officials described the failure as compounding rather than singular. Some personnel at Central Command reportedly relied too heavily on the AI embedded in Maven, which uses more than 150 data inputs to inform commanders' decisions, expecting the system to flag outdated information or inconsistencies in the intelligence, though it is unclear why they held that expectation. The target-approval process, traditionally involving intelligence analysts, imagery specialists, targeteers, lawyers, commanders and weapons crews, was compressed by Maven from hours to minutes. At the same time, staffing meant to catch such errors had been hollowed out: Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth had dismantled most of the Pentagon's civilian harm mitigation units, cutting staff by about 90 per cent to fewer than 20 personnel, with the CENTCOM team reduced from 10 to one; no civilian-harm specialist reviewed the Minab site before the strike, and while such a review was not mandatory, officials said it could have reduced the risk to civilians. Laurie Blank, who served as special counsel in the Pentagon's general counsel office from 2022 to 2024, told Bloomberg: "Haste can lead to errors."
Palantir has disputed responsibility for the underlying data. The company told Bloomberg it "is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies" and that there was no evidence its software was at fault, while two people familiar with its Pentagon contracts said the administration remains primarily responsible for the quality of the data fed into Maven. Since the strike, Palantir has added a capability allowing Maven to "re-review underlying intelligence to identify factors that would disqualify a target and flag inconsistencies and inaccuracies that human review may have missed." The episode follows earlier reporting by The Intercept that the Pentagon's civilian protection cuts predated the Iran campaign: Hegseth fired most of the Pentagon's civilian harm mitigation and response workers, replacing them with artificial intelligence, leading to a significant reduction in staff at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence and hindering their ability to protect civilians in conflict zones. The Pentagon has said its investigation into the strike remains open.
Go deeper: Bloomberg's full investigation, "Inside US Military 'Kill Chain' That Destroyed an Iranian School", and The Intercept's earlier reporting on the Pentagon's civilian harm staffing cuts.