Technical post-mortem of Constitutional AI

On February 28, satellite imagery recorded a girls’ school in Minab, Iran — the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school — intact at 10:23am local time. By 10:45am it was rubble. A precision weapon had struck the adjacent IRGC Naval compound. Most of the 148 dead were girls aged 7 to 12.

That same day, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, an AI system — Claude, built by Anthropic and integrated into Palantir’s Maven Smart System — was generating approximately 1,000 prioritized strike targets, complete with GPS coordinates, weapons recommendations, and automated legal justifications asserting compliance with international humanitarian law.

I want to be precise about what is established fact, what is inference, and what is the deeper question nobody is asking loudly enough ….

Compliant behavior, producing unconscionable outputs, with the paperwork in order.