LONDON, March 12. /TASS/. Strikes by Israel and the United States against a school and thousands of other civilian targets in Iran demonstrate the danger of the uncontrolled use of artificial intelligence (AI) in selecting bombing targets, the Financial Times (FT) reports.
"The girls’ school [bombing] feels to me like the building was on a target list for years. Yet this was missed, and the question is how?" a former senior US defense official said, asking not to be identified. "A machine? A human? I would like to believe AI can point out flaws like this, in theory. Unfortunately combat is never as pristine as the technology is designed to be."
The newspaper noted that during the operation in Iran, the US was actively employing AI for target selection. Whether such technologies were used in the strike on the school, and to what extent, remains unknown, the FT reports.
Traditionally, the decision-making chain involved printing off documents and waiting for a senior commander to study and approve it. "Those [older] kill chains are measured in hours and sometimes days," said a defense tech expert who asked to remain anonymous. "The point of [AI] is to shrink that into seconds and minutes, almost instantaneous."
On February 28, Iranian authorities reported a strike by the US and Israel on a girls' elementary school in the city of Minab in the south of the country. The strike killed 175 people, mostly students, along with parents and teachers, and wounded 95 others. US President Donald Trump later alleged that Iran's armed forces carried out the attack. However, investigators subsequently identified missile fragments found at the site as US-made.
The New York Times previously reported, citing preliminary Pentagon findings, that the United States was responsible for the Minab school strike. According to the newspaper, the Tomahawk strike resulted from a targeting error caused by outdated intelligence provided by the US Defense Intelligence Agency.