From The Guardian
AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying
By Kevin T Baker
On the first morning of Operation Epic Fury, 28 February 2026, American forces struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, in southern Iran, hitting the building at least two times during the morning session. American forces killed between 175 and 180 people, most of them girls between the ages of seven and 12.
Within days, the question that organised the coverage was whether Claude, a chatbot made by Anthropic, had selected the school as a target. Congress wrote to the US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, about the extent of AI use in the strikes. The New Yorker magazine asked whether Claude could be trusted to obey orders in combat, whether it might resort to blackmail as a self-preservation strategy, and whether the Pentagon’s chief concern should be that the chatbot had a personality. Almost none of this had any relationship to reality. The targeting for Operation Epic Fury ran on a system called Maven. Nobody was arguing about Maven...
In 2019, the scholar Morgan Ames published The Charisma Machine, a study of how certain technologies draw attention, resources and attribution toward themselves and away from everything else. The usual framework for understanding this dynamic is “hype”, but hype only describes what boosters do, and it assigns critics a privileged debunking role that still leaves the technology at the centre of every argument. A charismatic technology shapes the whole field around it, the way a magnet organises iron filings. LLMs may be the most powerful instance of this type in history...
Morgan Ames is a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information.
