PU 35: The Horror of Computerised War

Graves being dug for the victims of the US bombing of a school in Iran that killed over a hundred young girls (Iranian Foreign Media Department)

How the Pentagon switched decision making from humans to machines. And what it means for the future that computers now decide who lives and dies.

Punching Upwards, Episode 35 for 10 May 2026

Topics: Politics / War in Iran

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Credits

Thanks to Michael Mullan-Jensen, Evgeny Kuznetsov, Vlad A Gouf, Fadi Mansour, Bennet Piater, Eric and Sir Galteran for supporting this podcast financially and therefore making it possible for me to produce it!

See Also

• Punching Upwards 34: Scam Altman

• Punching Upwards 27: LLMs Are a Dead-End

• Punching Upwards 26: Trump Falls Into the Smart Bomb Trap

• Punching Upwards 24: The ELIZA Effect

Sources

1. Multi-Domain AI: The Future of Command and Control (CDAO at AIPCon 9), Palantir, 13 March 2026

2. New analysis of deadly girls’ school strike in Iran, LiveNow from Fox, 11 March 2026

3. Speeding Up the “Kill Chain”: Pentagon Bombs Thousands of Targets in Iran Using Palantir AI, Democracy Now!, 18 March 2026

4. Star Trek (The Original Series), Season 1, Episode 23: A Taste of Armageddon, Wikipedia

5. AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying, 26 March 2026

6. The AI War on Iran: Project Maven, a Secretive Palantir-Run System, Helps Pentagon Pick Bomb Targets, Democracy Now!, 31 March 2026

7. Old intelligence and AI? Behind the deadly attack on an Iranian girls’ school that left 175 dead, The Independent, 12 March 2026

8. Deadly strike on Iranian primary school raises questions about AI, accountability, South China Morning Post, 13 March 2026

9. The Algorithm of War: How Palantir and Anthropic Became Co-Belligerents in America’s Iran Campaign, Hilal Ahmad Khan, 12 March 2026

10. The Alignment Paradox: Claude AI and the Minab School Strike, Reddit, 8 March 2026

11. Report: Palantir took over Project Maven, the military AI program too unethical for Google, The Next Web, 11 December 2019

12. Project Maven to Deploy Computer Algorithms to War Zone by Year’s End, U.S. Department of War, 21 July 2017

13. Palantir Expands Maven Smart System AI/ML Capabilities to Military Services, Palantir press release via Business Wire, 20 September 2024

14. Omniscience, Omnipresence, and Omnipotence: Meet the Gods of AI Warfare, Wired, 23 March 2026

15. The AI Doomsday Machine Is Closer to Reality Than You Think, Politico, 2 September 2025

16. “God, It’s Terrifying”: How the Pentagon Got Hooked on AI War Machines, Bloomberg Businessweek, 12 March 2026

17. The Evolution of Time Sensitive Targeting: Operation Iraqi Freedom Results and Lessons, John M. Fyfe, Airpower Research Institute, February 2005

The theme music for the podcast is a track called Fight or Fall by Def Lev. Find out more about the show at fab.industries/podcast — new media, new rules!