By Guardian staff reporter
Publication Date: 2026-03-26 05:00:00
OOn the first morning of Operation Epic Fury, February 28, 2026, American forces attacked the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, southern Iran, hitting the building at least twice during the morning session. American forces killed between 175 and 180 people, most of them girls between the ages of seven and twelve.
Within days, the question that organized the coverage was whether Claude, a chatbot from Anthropic, had targeted the school. Congress wrote to US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth about the extent of AI use in the attacks. The New Yorker magazine questioned whether Claude could be trusted to obey orders in combat, whether he could resort to blackmail as a self-preservation strategy, and whether the Pentagon’s main concern should be that the chatbot has a personality. Almost none of it had any connection to reality. Target acquisition for Operation Epic Fury ran on a system called Maven. Nobody argued about Maven.
Eight years ago, Maven was the…
