Pentagon confirms AI picks Iran targets; 120+ in Congress demand answers

Admiral BCBrad Cooper, commander of U.S. Central Command, released a video on March 11, 2026 confirming that U.S. military forces are using a variety of advanced AI tools in Operation Epic Fury against Iran. He said these systems help warfighters sift through vast amounts of data in seconds and compress processes that once took hours or days into seconds. He added that humans will always make final decisions on what to shoot and what not to shoot and when to shoot, but that advanced AI tools can turn processes that used to take hours and sometimes even days into seconds. Cooper said U.S. forces had struck more than 5,500 targets in Iran by that date, including drone and ballistic missile sites, command-and-control facilities, ships, air defense systems, and military communications capabilities.

NBC News confirmed on March 11, citing two congressional sources, that Palantir''s Maven Smart System is the primary AI platform the Pentagon is using to identify airstrike targets in Iran. The Maven Smart System is built on Anthropic''s Claude AI model as its reasoning engine. The system allows 20 troops to manage targeting workloads that required 2,000 intelligence analysts during the 2003 Iraq invasion — a 100-to-1 compression in human judgment per targeting decision. Al Habtoor Research Centre provided historical context: by 2026, the Maven Smart System had evolved into a decision-support platform embedded across all U.S. combatant commands.

A Pentagon preliminary investigation found U.S. forces responsible for striking the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in Minab, Iran on February 28, 2026, killing at least 168 people, mostly schoolgirls aged 7 to 12 and their teachers. President Trump said he did not know about the strike when asked. Secretary Hegseth accused Iran of using civilian areas to launch military operations without providing specific evidence for that claim as it applied to this school. The school had been a former military facility but was walled off from the adjacent IRGC base by 2016 and had operated as a civilian girls' school for at least a decade before the strike.

More than 120 Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on March 12, 2026, demanding detailed information on how the military is limiting civilian casualties in Iran and what role AI played in choosing targets, including the school strike. Representative Sara Jacobs of 🌴California told NBC News that AI tools are not 100% reliable and can fail in subtle ways, and that operators continue to over-trust them. She called for strict guardrails on the military's use of AI and a guaranteed human in the loop for every decision to use lethal force.

The legal and institutional framework governing AI in military targeting is fragmented. The Pentagon maintains a policy requiring meaningful human control over lethal decisions, but the definition is internal and not subject to congressional or judicial review. Operation Epic Fury itself was launched without a formal congressional authorization for use of military force. Senate Democrats threatened to force multiple War Powers Resolution votes on March 10 if Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not appear for public hearings.

China publicly warned against AI''s military use on March 11, the same day Cooper confirmed U.S. AI targeting in Iran. Chinese officials called the unrestricted application of AI by the military a tool for violating other nations'' sovereignty. No binding international treaty limits the use of AI in targeting or requires human approval at any specific level of the decision chain. International humanitarian law scholars have called for urgent diplomatic action while the technology is still new enough that norms can be shaped.

The political context surrounding the AI targeting confirmation is inseparable from the Anthropic blacklisting dispute. Anthropic''s Claude AI is the reasoning engine inside Palantir''s Maven Smart System — meaning the Pentagon is simultaneously using Anthropic''s AI in active combat while designating Anthropic as a national security threat for refusing to remove safety guardrails. Pentagon spokeswoman Kingsley Wilson released a statement: America''s warfighters supporting Operation Epic Fury and every mission worldwide will never be held hostage by unelected tech executives and Silicon Valley ideology.