CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Machine and the Schoolhouse: Anthropic and the War on Iran

Rescuers at the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, Iran. Photo: Mehr News Agency. CC BY 4.0.

In the southern Iranian city of Minab, where the heat rises from the earth in shimmering waves and the reality of imperialism lingers in every port and military installation, a missile struck a school on 28 February 2026. The strike killed 156 people, notably 120 schoolchildren, which the Iranian government immediately called a ‘blatant crime.’ The United Nations called the attack ‘a grave violation of humanitarian law.’ The names of the murdered children have not circulated through the centres of global power with the same force as the names of generals, weapons systems, and technology platforms. The dead Iranians remain largely anonymous to those who debate the future of artificial intelligence (AI), which was used by the United States—as it turns out—on this strike.

The murder of the children has opened a window into one of the central questions of our age: who bears responsibility when a machine enters the chain of violence? What role AI played remains unclear. Press reports indicate that the US military’s Maven Smart System, which incorporates AI tools including Anthropic’s Claude model, was involved in military operations against Iran. Investigators continue to examine whether AI-assisted systems contributed in any way to the targeting process. The available evidence remains incomplete.

What is remarkable is that the leaders of the AI industry are no longer standing outside the machinery of war. They are inside it. When asked about the strike, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei said that he did ‘not know exactly’ how Claude had been used in this strike, which he described as ‘mistakes’ that are ‘really, really terrible.’........

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