OUR DAILY THREAD: Iran Is The Proving Ground
Immoral or amoral?
THE SET-UP: Battlefields are great laboratories. Combat conditions provide both the impetus and the opportunity to dream up new and exciting ways to kill people. And that’s exactly what Ukraine and Gaza have been for the emergent Tech-Industrial Complex.
Anduril, for instance, has used Ukraine to deploy, test and refine its AI-enhanced array of weapons systems. One such system—Altius loitering drones— failed during its debut in Ukraine. There were other notable fails in the US, too. Yet, none of that slowed down Anduril’s move to capture a chunk of the lucrative military hardware market from the traditional defense majors. That got a boost when Anduril’s CEO Palmer Luckey announced his decision to build his gargantuan drone factory in Ohio four days before the former Senator from Ohio was set to be sworn-in as the Veep. Here’s what Anduril told Bloomberg:
Anduril said its relationship Vice President-elect JD Vance, an Ohioan who was an early investor in Anduril while he was working as a VC, did not influence its decision to locate in the state.
Maybe. Maybe not.
It does get awfully cozy inside Trump’s regime.
Veep Vance is also cozy with Peter Thiel. He co-founded Palantir and he just-so-happens-to-be JD Vance’s initial financial backer straight out of college. Palantir’s profile has certainly grown over the last 15 months.
So has its government business.
It is successfully integrating itself into the Federal government through Trump’s presidency.
Maybe that’s because Palantir was also successful in using Ukraine as “a development lab” and in treating Gazans like guinea pigs in CEO Alex Karp’s gamified battlespace. The targeting systems compiling kill lists for Trump’s war on Iran no doubt benefited from two-plus years of Israeli impunity. One innovation is an application called “Where’s Daddy?” that stalked Gazan men until they when home to their families. The missiles we not launched until “daddy” walked into his family’s home or apartment. Both AP and Reuters independently found many nuclear families were wiped out and some extended families were completely wiped off the map in an instant, thus eliminating entire genetic lines.
Similar targeting systems have also been put to work in ICE’s crackdown on non-white immigrants, in the State Department’s crackdown on college students and it is becoming ever-more entangled throughout the Federal government.
More than any tech company, Palantir is leading the transition away from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions. Its integration with the IDF catalyzed and shaped the Conventions-busting rules of engagement that killed 18,457 Gazans under the age of 18 and demolished an entire society.
Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis was talking about Palantir and the “technological dimension of a genocide” at Qatar’s “Web Summit” back at the start of February. Varoufakis, who literally wrote the book on techno-feudalism, recounted a conversation that served as a clarifying moment:
I was talking to somebody who worked until very recently for Palantir, and he was telling me that the ‘Gaza event,’ that’s how he described it, was very exciting for technologists … and, while trying to avert a stroke in my head, I managed to ask him, explain to me why?
And he said, “What’s happening in Gaza is terrible, but it was fantastic for us.”
I said, “Please continue. Explain this to me. Why was it fantastic?”
“When you bomb people massively in a densely populated area, they do a lot of things.” And he pointed at my phone that was sitting there just like it is now on this table and he said, “Your phone is now not moving. It’s useless to us. It’s only when you move with it that it produces data for us to be able to train the algorithms.”
So, in a densely populated area like Gaza, you bomb people, if they’re not dead, they run around, they try to escape, they are moved from one place to another, they make phone calls, they try to find their loved ones, they rush to the hospital, the hospital is not there, they run even more … there is a lot of movement and we can train the algorithms and Palantir, using AWS—Amazon service, Oracle service, and so on and so forth—they are training their own AI programs to do what? To be able to be useful in producing AI commodities, products that they sell, let’s say, to the British National Health Service, to hospitals … for what?
For managing personnel inside the hospitals during emergencies. Let’s say there is a bad traffic pile-up, they can deal with that panic. They use the Palantir algorithms for organizing the manner in which the personnel operate.
These people are not immoral. They’re worse, They are amoral.
That came just weeks before Qatar found itself caught in the middle of another war-generated tech “laboratory”—this time in Iran. And the attack on Iran came just days after the CEO of Anthropic was blacklisted as a “supply chain risk” by the Pentagon for refusing to alter the terms by which Pete Hegseth’s lethality-obsessed Department of War used the company’s agentic AI. Here’s what Dario Amodei wrote:
Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions. We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner.
However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values. Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do. Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now:
Mass domestic surveillance. We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values. AI-driven mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties. To the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, this is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI. For example, under current law, the government can purchase detailed records of Americans’ movements, web browsing, and associations from public sources without obtaining a warrant, a practice the Intelligence Community has acknowledged raises privacy concerns and that has generated bipartisan opposition in Congress. Powerful AI makes it possible to assemble this scattered, individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life—automatically and at massive scale.
Fully autonomous weapons. Partially autonomous weapons, like those used today in Ukraine, are vital to the defense of democracy. Even fully autonomous weapons (those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets) may prove critical for our national defense. But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk. We have offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems, but they have not accepted this offer. In addition, without proper oversight, fully autonomous weapons cannot be relied upon to exercise the critical judgment that our highly trained, professional troops exhibit every day. They need to be deployed with proper guardrails, which don’t exist today.
To our knowledge, these two exceptions have not been a barrier to accelerating the adoption and use of our models within our armed forces to date.
It was stunning reveal, particularly in the context of what we now know was an impeding attack on Iran. And let’s dispense with various justifications offered thus far. A report by FOX News foreign correspondent Trey Yingst reveals that the attack was always a fait accompli:
“At the time of the strike, when Operation Epic Fury began, when the Ayatollah Khamenei was actually killed, he was above ground, he did not go into this bunker and that is why the Israelis were able to kill him in part, because he didn’t think that he was going to be targeted,” Yingst told Fox & Friends.
According to Yingst, Israeli officials said that false sense of security was part of an effort coordinated strategy at senior levels between Washington and Jerusalem: “There was a deception campaign, I am told by a senior Israeli official, to make the Iranians think this attack wasn’t even going to begin.”
The official told Fox & Friends that despite visible military preparations, Khamenei’s inner circle failed to move him underground. Part of the strategy involved signals meant to lull Tehran into complacency, including public posts and statements from Trump himself.
“There were a number of posts made and statements by President Trump in the 24 hours leading up to the beginning of this operation,” he said. “All of this meant to deceive Iranian leadership,” Yingst reported.
I think it is safe to say both attacks were always going to happen and both negotiations were holding patterns until everything was in place for an attack. After decades of lobbying the US to pick-off one Muslim nation after another, there was no way Netanyahu was going to let his White Whale escape. Trump has played along throughout … perhaps because MBS wants Iran to be a neutered failed state, too.
If Lebanon, Syria and Gaza are any guide, Israel is bent on turning Iran into a failed state without the ability to protect or preserve its borders or control its own airspace. Israel has shown that it reserves the right to bomb a growing roster of countries and peoples. And that’s not just about killing individual actors or organizations. Israel excels at meting-out collective punishment. With the announcement today of a widening of the bombing to include infrastructure, they are beginning that phase of the war … the toppling not of the government, but of civil society and the society itself. Militarily, they’ve mastered denying people water treatment plants and electricity and healthcare.
When they do that, they generate a ton of usable information for Palantir. People responding to the sudden, catastrophic loss of public services will, apparently, be a data gold mine. Just think of the applications one could sell FEMEA based of monitoring feeling Iranians!
What’s more, Iran is a fantastic place to test fully autonomous drones like those Dario Amodei objected to last week. Iran hasn’t controlled its airspace since the first rounds of bombs fell last year. It is basically a giant bombing range and proving ground. Maybe that’s why the Secretary of War(mongering) is treating the war like a massive live-fire war game. Because the Iranian military is so enfeebled, Hegseth can act with complete impunity … thanks also goes to the ghoulish benchmark in impunity Hegseth’s Israeli partners set in Gaza.
And like Gaza, we can see where this is going.
After Israel metes out its punishment, the nation-state will likely fail to deliver basic services. Internal division and desperation set-in. And after Israel has liquidated everyone Palantir (or any other AI, for that matter) marked for death, Trump’s Board of Peace will roll in with an offer to “rebuild” the infrastructure and “develop” the economy. In trade, the US will require oil and gas. Yes, America is already starting to demand tribute from vassal states. Venezuela just forked over some gold.
Looking back, it now seems clear that Venezuela, which is the only non-Muslim nation he has attacked (although their Iran ties are practically the same thing), was decapitated in preparation for this ultimate move in Iran. Its oil was likely seen as the buffer that would allow him to avoid tapping the strategic oil reserve, among other things. Basically, Trump thought he’d be able to withstand a clogged Gulf for a while by leaning on extra oil from Venezuela. At the same time, President Xi’s China takes an energy hit just a few weeks before Trump meets Xi in China.
Yes, China is looming in so far as it is one of the few nations, if not the only nation that Trump cannot threaten with bombing. Make no mistake, Iran is a demonstration to the world that the US is no longer recognizes the constraints of the post-War order it authored. And it is now moving down the path of full-blown military empire and it will bomb preemptively and without justification. It can do so because AI is making on-demand killing easier and easier with each passing day.
Dario Amodei has now learned that bloodthirstiness is a feature of the Technology-Industrial Complex. His principled stand garnered a lot support and Anthropic can probably challenge Trump’s supply chain threat designation. But Amodei is an outlier in the Valley. He is the bug (even though the Pentagon still used Anthropic’s AI in the initial attack). The problem is that the more the Alex Karps of the world feed on war’s corpses, the easier the Alex Karps will make it to kill with an almost pedestrian ease. In December of last year, Karp remarked in a public dialogue that making current war crimes legal would be great for his business. Sadly, he doesn’t care what that says about him or his business. Quite to the contrary.- jp
US military admits Iranian drones harder to stop than expected
https://www.dagens.com/news/us-military-admits-iranian-drones-harder-to-stop-than-expected
Iran’s $20,000 drones vs $4 million US missiles: How Shahed swarms have challenged the American Patriot
https://www.news9live.com/opinion-analysis/usd-20000-drones-vs-usd-4-million-missiles-how-irans-shahed-swarms-have-challenged-us-army-patriot-2939525
The US is using repurposed Iranian drone technology to attack Iran – a military expert explains why
https://theconversation.com/the-us-is-using-repurposed-iranian-drone-technology-to-attack-iran-a-military-expert-explains-why-277397
Expert: Cyber is the 'fuel' for Israel, US in Iran war
https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-888820
The first AI war? How algorithms and data are reshaping the war with Iran
https://www.ynetnews.com/tech-and-digital/article/sjksd11ikbg
How AI is accelerating ‘the kill chain’ in the U.S.-Israel war with Iran
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.7117662
Trump’s strike on Iran and the new breed of AI wars mean bombs can drop faster than the speed of thought
https://fortune.com/2026/03/03/iran-war-trump-strikes-anthropic-ai-used-in-pentagon-speed-of-thought/
1,000 targets in 24 hours: How US military used AI to hit Iran
https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/donald-trump-us-military-ai-artificial-intelligence-anthropic-claude-maven-ai-systems-iran-war-israel-middle-east-crisis-2878474-2026-03-07
Hacked traffic cams and hijacked TVs: How cyber operations supported the war against Iran
https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/03/hacked-traffic-cams-and-hijacked-tvs-how-cyber-operations-supported-the-war-against-iran/
Palantir awarded $1 billion DHS contract for AI and data analytics rollout
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billion-dollar-palantir-contract-gives-213500997.html
The West is superior and must always win. This is how Palantir views the world
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/10/10/the-west-is-superior-and-must-always-win-this-is-how-palantir-views-the-world-a4909001