\n\tBy Katrina Manson and Emily Chang<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tAnthropic PBC\u2019s boss said he doesn\u2019t know what role his artificial intelligence model played in a missile strike that killed an estimated 120 children at an elementary school in Iran, reflecting a broader knowledge gap for AI executives who are increasingly selling advanced AI tools to the US military.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tBut he said the use case in this instance didn\u2019t violate the company\u2019s policies, arguing military decision makers make terrible mistakes even at the best of times.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\n\t\u201cLook, we don\u2019t have access to, we don\u2019t know exactly how these models were used,\u201d Dario Amodei, Anthropic\u2019s CEO and cofounder told Bloomberg\u2019s The Circuit with Emily Chang in an interview, when asked whether his company\u2019s AI tool Claude played a role in the February 28 strike \u2014 the first day of US operations in Iran \u2014 on the school in Minab. He described the strike against the school as \u201ca really terrible thing to happen.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cThe principle that we have established, and I think the principle that was obeyed here, is a human makes the final decision,\u201d Amodei said. \u201cI don\u2019t know what role Claude or any other AI had, but if this isn\u2019t an illustration why that principle is so important, I don\u2019t know what is.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe Pentagon, which hasn\u2019t publicly claimed responsibility for the strike, is investigating the incident.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tA long-running debate about the role of AI at war pits those who hope AI will reduce mistakes in war, save lives and deliver victories against campaigners and experts who worry that speeding through targets will make war worse and lead to greater civilian harm. There is also debate about the extent to which technology companies should be privy to how their AI tools are used and whether they should be held responsible for outputs that result in mistakes.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tHamza Chaudhry, at the Future of Life Institute, a group that emphasizes the risks of military AI, warns that AI targeting processes could ultimately speed up so fast that nominal human decision-making amounts to little more than a \u201crubber stamp.\u201d As a result, he said, the expanded scale of combat could result in the taking of many more lives.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tAmodei\u2019s comments bolster previous reporting from Bloomberg News that AI frontier companies have little oversight of the powerful, sometimes unreliable and potentially deadly tools they are sending into combat. At the same time, the Pentagon is seeking to accelerate its AI adoption on the battlefield.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe Anthropic CEO triggered a row with the Trump administration earlier this year by drawing a line at using his company\u2019s AI tools in fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. As a result, the Pentagon made the unprecedented decision to designate the US company as a supply-chain risk, triggering a lawsuit from privately held Anthropic that is ongoing.<\/p>\n
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\n\tNevertheless, Amodei\u2019s AI is playing a role in the US war with Iran.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tUS Central Command is using an AI-assisted platform named Maven Smart System that uses Claude and other AI tools to help generate so-called points of interest, help its personnel make decisions and speed up processes for its military operations against Iran. The command has emphasized the unusually high quantity of targets that US operators have hit in a short period of time: striking 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of operations and 13,000 targets by April 6, little more than a month after operations began.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tAsked whether he was comfortable with Claude\u2019s role in hitting more targets and helping to kill people more quickly, Amodei said he supported the US having the ability to be more effective militarily, arguing that the ability to be \u201cstronger\u201d deters rather than causes wars.<\/p>\n
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\n\t\u201cYou basically have to leave policy in the hands of the military decision makers,\u201d he said, noting that a human makes the final decision.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tAmodei argued that developing AI warfare could help avoid World War III and help defend Taiwan from invasion from China, so long as the technology wasn\u2019t used without limits or in a way that undermined democratic values.<\/p>\n
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\n\t\u201cWhen I see Russia invading Ukraine, when I see the risk of China invading Taiwan, it worries me that we have a kind of resurgent authoritarian bloc, that they\u2019re very aggressive and that we need to defend ourselves,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\t\u201cWe don\u2019t want a world where China and Russia can build, can analyze all the intelligence with AI, can use AI for attacking Taiwan and Ukraine, and we can\u2019t defend them,\u201d he added.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\tBut even some supporters of AI warfare are increasingly wary of the risks involved.<\/p>\n
\t\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of governance pieces that, in my opinion, are missing,\u201d Jack Shanahan, retired Air Force lieutenant general and former director of Project Maven, the Pentagon effort that birthed Maven Smart System, told a Stanford University workshop devoted to the future of decision-making last week. He warned that integrating Claude into Maven Smart System could lead to unexpected impacts and dilute the role of human judgment.<\/p>\n
\t\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\tWhile one advantage of AI is to give humans more time to make decisions, Shanahan said he worried that \u201cType A\u201d personalities in the military may use that extra time to make more decisions rather than better decisions.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\t\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\u201cIf you make more decisions rather than the right decisions, you may have a very flawed decision-making process,\u201d he said. \u201cYou may have a thousand targets, but are they the right targets?\u201d<\/p>\n
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