On 28 February 2026, American forces struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, southern Iran, killing between 175 and 180 people, most of them girls aged seven to 12. The attack occurred on the first morning of Operation Epic Fury, with the building hit at least twice during the morning session.
Initial coverage focused on whether Claude, an Anthropic chatbot, had selected the school as a target. Congress wrote to US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth about AI use in the strikes, and media outlets questioned Claude's reliability. However, the targeting system used was Maven, a project originally developed by Google and later taken over by Palantir Technologies.
Maven integrates satellite imagery, signals intelligence, and sensor data to identify targets and manage the kill chain. The school had been misclassified as a military facility in a Defense Intelligence Agency database that had not been updated to reflect its conversion from a Revolutionary Guard compound into a school—a change visible in satellite imagery since 2016.
The tragedy resulted from human failure to update a database, combined with a system fast enough to make that error lethal. The obsession with LLMs like Claude distracts from the real issue: the bureaucratic and technological infrastructure that enabled the strike.
This focus on charismatic technologies, as scholar Morgan Ames described, shapes public debate around LLMs while ignoring older, more mature systems like Maven. The true question is not about AI chatbots but about the kill chain and the role of companies like Palantir in modern warfare.
