The US is waging AI-assisted war on Iran. Here's how
The US is waging AI-assisted war on Iran. Here's how
Cybele Mayes-Osterman, USA TODAY Wed, April 1, 2026 at 8:07 PM UTC
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Hundreds of Iranian civilian deaths in the war have put the U.S. military's new AI systems in the spotlight and raised concerns from lawmakers over whether these systems are making deadly mistakes.
Experts and former officials say the military's artificial intelligence systems are central to "Operation Epic Fury," which is seeing AI deployed on the battlefield to a new degree.
"For somebody who spent years talking about how we're moving too slow, I'm now concerned about how fast we're moving," said Jack Shanahan, a retired lieutenant general who led efforts to develop and integrate AI into the military.
"At some point it may become increasingly difficult to define what an advanced AI system must not do, as opposed to humans defining what they want it to do."
1 / 0See the army division known for its elite paratroopers throughout history
The Pentagon is moving to deploy thousands of soldiers from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Reuters reported. The reported deployment from the army division known for its elite paratroopers bolsters a force that already consists of thousands of Marines, sailors and an amphibious assault ship. See photos of other moments in U.S. history the 82nd Airborne Division has been deployed.American soldiers watch as men of the 504th Parachute Infantry of the 82nd Airborne Division descend on Tempelhof Airport, Berlin, Sept. 6, 1945. The jump from a height of only 750 ft was in honour of Marshall Zhukov of the Soviet Union who captured Berlin and at the end of the WW II became commander-in-chief of the Russian zone of Germany.
At a closed door House Armed Services Committee briefing on March 25, Pentagon officials told lawmakers AI was used in data management, but not final target selection, according to a person with knowledge of the briefing.
U.S. soldiers are "leveraging a variety of advanced AI tools," Adm. Brad Cooper, the commander of U.S. Central Command, said in a March 11 video update on the war. "Humans will always make final decisions on what to shoot and what not to shoot and when to shoot but advanced AI tools can turn processes that used to take hours, and sometimes even days, into seconds."
The military has hit more than 12,000 targets in the monthlong Iran war, including more than 1,000 in the first 24 hours after the war launched on Feb. 28. One of the sites bombed that day was an Iranian school, leading to at least 175 deaths, most of them children.
Experts and former officials say the military's artificial intelligence systems are central to 'Operation Epic Fury.'
In the early days of the war, the U.S. military fired more long-range, expensive missiles to hit Iran from far away, but has since shifted to using more short-range, gravity bombs that can be dropped from aircraft, now that Iran's air defenses are degraded, according to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine and other officials.
The first targets struck likely came from longstanding Pentagon plans for an Iran attack, said Emelia Probasco, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology who studies military uses of AI.
More: Who attacked a girls' school in Iran, and will there be accountability?
But as the war drags on, AI could play an increasing role, Probasco said, including in "prioritization" of targets – telling soldiers where to hit first.
"We are now entering the phase where those targets have been attacked and now you could potentially start to see an even greater impact of AI," she said. "You're looking for time critical targets, targets that move, targets that we didn't know about before."
20 soldiers with AI match the work of 2,000
For nearly a decade, the military has been integrating an AI tool known as the Maven Smart System into its computer systems. The system, often shortened to "Maven," fuses the military's many, disparate channels of data, intelligence, satellite imagery and asset movements into a single software platform. Military leaders say the system can make decisions in the heat of battle faster and more effective.
The system has already drastically increased the number of targets that a given number of operators can hit. According to Probasco's 2024 study of Army exercises using the system, roughly 20 people using it could match the work of more than 2,000 soldiers in Iraq war-era targeting cells then considered the most efficient in U.S. military history.
And its development in the two years since her study has been "dramatic," she added.
In a demo of the Maven Smart System at a March 12 conference, Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon's chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, showed the ease with which a user could turn a structure into a ball of flame with a "left click, right click, left click."
On the screen behind Cameron, a cursor hovered over an overhead image of lined up cars, showing numbers representing their measurements, locational coordinates and other data. With a few clicks, the "detection" of an object could be moved into a "targeting workflow," Cameron said.
The system offered a choice of "which metrics AI should prioritize," including "time to target," "distance," or "munitions." A sleek graphic appeared to show on a map the circular blast radius that the strike would create, and the arc that the weapons would travel. After a couple clicks on a blue "approve" bar and green "task executed" bar, the dark cloud of an explosion filled the screen.
"When we started this, it literally took hours to do what you just saw there," Cameron said.
Iran school strike raises AI questions
In spite of officials' claims that AI improves the military's accuracy, the civilian death toll in Iran has raised concerns over whether it has contributed to faulty targeting.
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Lawmakers have asked whether AI played a role in the school strike. Investigations by the New York Times and other outlets found that the United States was likely behind the strike, which used a U.S.-made Tomahawk missile. The school may have been on an outdated list of targets that the military failed to recheck, according to those reports. The Pentagon has said its own investigation into the strike is ongoing.
Smoke rises following an explosion during a protest marking the annual al-Quds Day (Jerusalem Day) on the last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan, in Tehran, Iran, on March 13.
More than a hundred lawmakers in the House and Senate signed letters sent to Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth in mid-March asking whether the Maven Smart System was involved in the strike on the school, and for more details on how the military is checking the work of AI.
Shanahan said he saw "no indications" that AI was involved in the strike, "but we need to acknowledge that while future AI will be capable of finding more targets than ever before, humans must remain responsible and accountable for the decisions to hit those targets.”
In past military exercises, AI has demonstrated far lower accuracy than humans. In the Army exercises that Probasco studied, the Maven Smart System could correctly identify a tank around 60% of the time, as compared to a human soldier's 84% accuracy, and that number dropped to just 30% in snowy weather. An AI targeting system tested by the Air Force in 2021 hit just 25% accuracy when it was tested on imperfect conditions.
The Pentagon in 2023 issued a directive that soldiers and commanders using AI systems must be able to "exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force."
"Our military operates in full compliance with all U.S. laws and established policies, such as ensuring a human is always in the loop for critical operational decisions," the Pentagon said in a statement to USA TODAY.
"The responsibility for the lawful use of any AI tool rests with the human operator and the chain of command, not within the software itself."
Pentagon goes after company behind its AI chatbot
The Trump administration as a whole has moved to remove regulations around AI in the name of innovation and cutting bureaucracy, and the Pentagon has followed suit. In a Jan. 9 memo laying out the military's AI strategy, Hegseth directed the Pentagon to work towards "unleashing experimentation" with AI models and "aggressively identifying and eliminating bureaucratic barriers to deeper integration" of AI.
"We must accept that the risks of not moving fast enough outweigh the risks of imperfect alignment," the memo read.
Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth directed the Pentagon to work towards 'unleashing experimentation' with AI models and 'aggressively identifying and eliminating bureaucratic barriers to deeper integration' of AI.
In recent months, that approach has put the Pentagon at odds with Anthropic, the Silicon Valley company behind Claude, the only AI chatbot that is currently configured to operate on the Maven Smart System.
Anthropic sought out an agreement from the Pentagon that its technology would not be used for mass surveillance, or to hit targets without human signoff. The Pentagon refused to accept those terms, saying Claude must be available to the military for "all lawful uses," as its officials publicly blasted the company on social media. The Pentagon moved to declare the company a "supply chain risk" – a designation meant to restrict companies vulnerable to sabotage or subversion by U.S. adversaries – but was blocked from the move by a federal judge's ruling on March 26.
"The military will not allow a vendor to insert itself into the chain of command by restricting the lawful use of a critical capability," the Pentagon said in a statement. "It is the military's sole responsibility to ensure our warfighters have the tools they need to win in a crisis, without interference from corporate policies."
Anthropic has said in statements that it does not believe the Pentagon has yet used Claude in a way that broke its conditions. But the dispute reportedly arose after Anthropic learned that the military used Claude in its operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. "Anthropic currently does not have confidence," the company maintained in court documents, "that Claude would function reliably or safely if used to support lethal autonomous warfare."
AI built for military purposes "already has a lot of accuracy issues," but language learning models like Claude "are actually even more inaccurate," said Heidy Khlaaf, chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute.
"They're not very good at solving for tasks outside of what they've been trained on, and that's ok if you're using it in a non critical environment, like writing an email, but that's very different when you're dealing with novel scenarios like a fog of war."
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The dispute with Claude is not the first time that the increasing business partnerships between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon to create high tech weapons and military tools have come under criticism from the companies building them. Google was originally contracted to work on the Maven Smart System in its early developmental stages, but dropped the contract in 2018 in response to a protest movement from its workers. Google and Amazon workers have also in recent years protested the companies' AI contract with the Israeli military and Google's work with immigration and border enforcement.
"If any tech company caves to the Pentagon’s demands," Hegseth "will have the power to build and deploy A.I.-powered drones that kill people without the approval of any human," a group of organizations representing Amazon, Google, and Microsoft workers wrote in a statement on the Anthropic dispute.
Shanahan said human control of AI for military uses is a "nonnegotiable starting point," but it could eventually be confined to the design and development of systems that increasingly operate on their own.
"You're going to be operating under the assumption that at some point an autonomous weapon is released, and no human will have the ability to bring it back.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How the US is waging AI-assisted war on Iran
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