Eventually, a nominated target (“a detection”) gets moved to a new “workflow” called CoA (for course of action) generation, in which the AI helps choose the best available weapon. From there “we can move directly into ‘how do we action that target?’,” i.e., how do we blow it up or kill it.

Eight years ago, Google bailed out of Project Maven. Thousands of its employees had threatened to resign at the very idea of creating a “GoogleEarth for War” — a zoom-in-or-out video-and-satellite feed that could, with just a few mouse clicks, destroy or kill what it sees.

Just several weeks ago, Anthropic, another tech company with halfhearted “Don’t Be Evil” pretensions, got into a similar public row with the Pentagon. Anthropic said it did not want the government to use its Claude AI for “mass surveillance” and “fully autonomous weapons.”

One day later, the United States and Israel launched our sneak-attack assassination of the Iranian leadership in a massive bombing campaign that also accidentally killed about 175 people, most of them children, at an elementary school.