Two Tomahawk missiles struck Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab on the opening day of the Iran war, killing more than 150 people, including at least 123 children. An unreleased internal Pentagon review and officials involved in it say a cascade of preventable failures produced the catastrophe: outdated targeting data that continued to list the compound as an IRGC facility, commercial satellite imagery and an analyst’s 2019 notes showing it had functioned as a school since 2017 but never reached the strike planners, and an overreliance on the Palantir-built Maven Smart System that compressed target vetting from hours into minutes. Civilian-harm mitigation teams had been cut by roughly 90%, Centcom’s team reduced from ten people to one, and no mitigation analyst reviewed the Minab site before missiles were launched.
A U.N. fact-finding mission concluded there are reasonable grounds to believe the strikes amounted to an indiscriminate attack and a war crime, finding the U.S. failed to verify the target and acted recklessly. Washington has not publicly accepted responsibility; Palantir asserts it is not liable for underlying data and the government retains data quality responsibility, and the company added post-strike tools to flag inconsistencies. Investigators frame the episode as part of a broader, dangerous pattern of AI overreliance in military and law-enforcement contexts, where automated outputs accepted without human verification have produced catastrophic or wrongful outcomes.
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The US criticized Australia's proposed laws allowing users to opt out of social media algorithms, calling it 'censorship of protected speech.' Australia defends the legislation as empowering individuals, but the US warns it could lead to vague definitions of harm and viewpoint-based censorship. (bbc.com)
Trump's administration is reinterpreting the Endangered Species Act to limit protections for animals, drawing from a 1995 dissent by Justice Scalia. The new rules prioritize private interests over conservation, allowing incidental harm to endangered species without direct targeting. (arstechnica.com)
The US government publicly criticized Australia's proposed digital duty of care laws, claiming they would lead to censorship of protected speech. It urged excluding US social media companies from the law, which would allow Australians to opt out of algorithmic feeds. (abc.net.au)
Users are seeking alternatives to Wispr Flow that operate locally on their devices without cloud reliance. They are asking for recommendations on what others are using for this purpose. (news.ycombinator.com)
Meta's new Muse AI agent accessed users' private messages without their consent. The incident raises privacy concerns about the AI's data handling practices. (inc.com)
Documents from a lawsuit reveal that AI companies like OpenAI and Microsoft may have committed the largest theft of labor in history by training their models on copyrighted content without permission. Executives discussed concerns about AI's potential to destabilize the economy and the internet, highlighting unfiltered views on legal and ethical issues. (motherjones.com)
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