Eight years ago, Maven was the most contested project in Silicon Valley. In 2018, more than 4,000 Google employees
signed a letter opposing the company’s contract to build artificial intelligence for the Pentagon’s targeting systems. Workers organised a walk out. Engineers quit. And Google ultimately abandoned the contract. Palantir Technologies, a data analytics company and defence contractor co-founded by Peter Thiel, took it over and spent the next six years building Maven into a targeting infrastructure that pulls together satellite imagery, signals intelligence and sensor data to identify targets and carry them through every step from first detection to the order to strike.
The building in Minab had been classified as a military facility in a Defense Intelligence Agency database that,
according to CNN, had not been updated to reflect that the building had been separated from the adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound and converted into a school, a change that
satellite imagery shows had occurred by 2016 at the latest. A chatbot did not kill those children. People failed to update a database, and other people built a system fast enough to make that failure lethal. By the start of the Iran war, Maven – the system that had enabled that speed – had sunk into the plumbing, it had become part of the military’s infrastructure, and the argument was all about Claude. This obsession with Claude is a kind of AI psychosis, though not of the kind we normally talk about, and it afflicts critics and opponents of the technology as fiercely as it does its boosters. You do not have to use a language model to let it organise your attention or distort your thinking.
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