Retired U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus said he believes a human made the final decision in the Minab school strike, as an unpublished Pentagon inquiry leaves AI’s role unresolved.
At the NDTV World Summit on Oct. 23, Petraeus said AI helped with targeting but a person made the call, NDTV reported. His remarks reflected his assessment; the Pentagon has not published its investigation findings.
Bloomberg’s investigation, citing people involved in the internal review, described AI recommendations entering the target process. Those sources said military records still labeled the Shajaret Tayebe Primary School site as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) facility. Bloomberg reported that the Maven Smart System then included it among the sites recommended for attack on the war’s first day. Some U.S. Central Command personnel placed too much confidence in Maven’s recommendations, the sources told Bloomberg. The system also reduced proposed-target list work that had taken hours in earlier conflicts to a matter of minutes, the report said.
Bloomberg also reported that civilian-harm specialists did not assess the site before the strike. The outlet linked their absence to staff cuts and decisions affecting the team’s role. Bloomberg described Maven as informing a human decision process; it did not report that the software ordered or carried out the attack.
A U.N. fact-finding mission said a U.S. airstrike hit the school in Minab with two cruise missiles on Feb. 28. It reported 157 people killed, including 123 boys and girls, and said there were reasonable grounds to believe the strike was the war crime of “making a civilian object the object of an attack.” A separate U.N. communication in July cited information received that at least 168 people had died; it did not give that figure as a final count.
U.S. Rep. Jason Crow asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in an Oct. 13 letter for the investigation’s status and a public release date by Oct. 26. Bloomberg reported Oct. 15, citing people familiar with the matter, that senior Pentagon officials planned to delay publication until after the U.S. midterm elections. The Pentagon has not announced a release date.
