Anthropic's ToS restricts the DoW from using their models for 1. Fully autonomous weapons systems, and 2. Mass domestic surveillance. There is no carve-out regarding who the autonomous weapons systems would be used against.
> Two sources confirmed to NBC News that Palantir’s AI systems, which draw in part on large language model technology, were used to identify targets. (Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, said he “can’t go into specifics” when asked about this on CNBC, but said that Claude was still integrated into Palantir’s systems used in the Iran war.) Brad Cooper, head of the US Central Command, has boasted that the military is using AI in Iran to “sift through vast amounts of data in seconds” in order to “make smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react”.
Iran had the courtyard painted in bright pastel pink/blue colors with murals and playground markings to clearly identify it as an elementary school. The Pentagon claimed they had "outdated intelligence data"
The Iranian strikes didn’t involve autonomous weapons systems. The “AI” component was used for target selection.
The actual aiming and firing of the weapon was performed by humans. In theory the target selection was also vetted by humans, but humans relying on exactly the same data that resulted in the “AI” systems misidentification of the target.
I put “AI” in scare quotes there, because these systems are really data processing pipelines, rather than LLM style AI systems.
I think the fully autonomous weapons systems restriction is not a very serious one and is very easy to circumvent.
What if you can hire a human to push a single approve button? And what if that human's job is to front load approvals by pressing the approve button a few thousand times, every morning?
Yeah, but then responsibility for the consequences of action of the system falls onto person pressing the button. I hope that no one would be willing to take such responsibility without second thought.
What part of placing a human in the loop requires telling that human what they’re approving, or even that they are approving something? Pressing a button could be as simple as following orders—or giving orders.
What does "Fully autonomous" mean? If someone presses a single button to authorize an autonomous drone to enter a theatre and conduct autonomous strikes for 4 hours without any further approval is it truely "fully autonomous?"
Yes. A munition that hangs around waiting for targets and decides whether it should attack without checking with a human. That’s a fully autonomous weapon.
Can you provide your definition of an autonomous weapon? It feels at the moment you are taking the absolute extreme position of only “autonomous” if a human was never involved. By that definition a human deciding to build an autonomous weapon automatically makes the weapon not autonomous…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/mar/...
> Two sources confirmed to NBC News that Palantir’s AI systems, which draw in part on large language model technology, were used to identify targets. (Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, said he “can’t go into specifics” when asked about this on CNBC, but said that Claude was still integrated into Palantir’s systems used in the Iran war.) Brad Cooper, head of the US Central Command, has boasted that the military is using AI in Iran to “sift through vast amounts of data in seconds” in order to “make smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react”.
Iran had the courtyard painted in bright pastel pink/blue colors with murals and playground markings to clearly identify it as an elementary school. The Pentagon claimed they had "outdated intelligence data"