Yesterday in AI: 10 June 2026 — CEO Can't Account for 120 Dead Children
Dario Amodei admits he doesn't know if Claude targeted the school that killed 120 children in Iran; Claude Code 2.1.172 ships recursive 5-level sub-agent spawning; OpenAI redesigns ChatGPT's model picker with six intent-based tiers.
By OMC Editorial on 2026-06-11
TL;DR — Dario Amodei told Bloomberg he doesn't know if Claude was used to target the Minab school that killed 120 children; Claude Code 2.1.172 ships recursive sub-agent spawning up to 5 levels deep; OpenAI redesigns ChatGPT's model picker with six speed-reasoning tiers replacing model names.
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1️⃣ Anthropic CEO Can't Confirm If Claude Killed 120 Children in Iran
- What: In a Bloomberg interview published June 10, CEO Dario Amodei said he doesn't know what role Claude played in a February 28 missile strike that killed approximately 120 children at the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in Minab, Iran.
- Why it matters: It's the first time an AI CEO has publicly acknowledged ignorance about his model's role in a lethal strike — and said it doesn't violate company policy.
- Key number: 1,000+ targets struck in the first 24 hours using Maven Smart System, Palantir's targeting platform $1.3B Pentagon contract that runs Claude.
The US military's Maven Smart System embeds Claude to semi-autonomously rank targets by strategic importance and draft automated legal justifications for strikes, with human commanders providing final approval. Over the first 38 days of the Iran conflict, the system helped identify more than 13,000 targets. The Minab strike killed at least 120 schoolchildren; a Central Command assessment blamed stale intelligence — the school had long been converted from a former military facility but remained on an AI-generated target list.
Amodei told Bloomberg the use case doesn't violate Anthropic's policies because "a human makes the final decision," but acknowledged: "We don't have access to, we don't know exactly how these models were used." The same refusal to remove guardrails on fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance had led the Pentagon to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk in March 2026 — a designation Anthropic is fighting in federal court.
📎 Bloomberghttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-10/anthropic-