The building in Minab had been classified as a military facility in a Defense Intelligence Agency database that,
according to CNN, had not been updated to reflect that the building had been separated from the adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound and converted into a school, a change that
satellite imagery shows had occurred by 2016 at the latest. A chatbot did not kill those children. People failed to update a database, and other people built a system fast enough to make that failure lethal. By the start of the Iran war, Maven – the system that had enabled that speed – had sunk into the plumbing, it had become part of the military’s infrastructure, and the argument was all about Claude. This obsession with Claude is a kind of AI psychosis, though not of the kind we normally talk about, and it afflicts critics and opponents of the technology as fiercely as it does its boosters. You do not have to use a language model to let it organise your attention or distort your thinking.