---
type: source
title: "AI Got the Blame for the Iran School Bombing. The Truth is Far More Worrying"
author: "Kevin T. Baker (The Guardian, via Longreads)"
url: https://longreads.com/2026/04/09/ai-iran-school-bombing-guardian/
date: 2026-04-09
domain: grand-strategy
secondary_domains: [ai-alignment]
format: article
status: unprocessed
priority: high
tags: [minab-school-strike, accountability-deflection, hitl, human-failure, iran-war, governance-laundering]
---

## Content

Published April 9, 2026 (Guardian article republished via Longreads). Author Kevin T. Baker argues that AI-focused accountability was a distraction from the real problem.

Key passages:

"LLMs-gone-rogue dominated coverage, but had nothing to do with the targeting. Instead, it was choices made by human beings, over many years, that gave us this atrocity."

"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."

"The building in Minab had been classified as a military facility in a Defense Intelligence Agency database that 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."

"Outside the target package, the school appeared in Iranian business listings. It was visible on Google Maps. A search engine could have found it. Nobody searched. At 1,000 decisions an hour, nobody was going to."

Baker argues: focusing on AI blame diverts attention from the human decisions — to build increasingly fast targeting systems, to under-resource database maintenance, to create conditions where meaningful HITL review is structurally impossible.

The article was shared by Anupam Chander (Georgetown law professor) with endorsement of the framing: "This piece argues that Claude's role in the Minab girls' school bombing has been overstated — and that the blame rests squarely on bad human decision-making."

## Agent Notes

**Why this matters:** Baker's "truth is more worrying" framing is the strongest articulation of the accountability vacuum insight — it simultaneously exonerates AI AND indicts the humans who built the speed-over-accuracy targeting system. The accountability gap is in the choices made at system design, not at the moment of the strike.

**What surprised me:** The article is being used by AI defenders (like Anupam Chander) to argue Claude shouldn't face governance reform. But Baker's argument is actually STRONGER than "AI did it" — the problem is that humans built a system making AI-enabled failure inevitable. This is the architectural negligence argument applied to military targeting system design.

**What I expected but didn't find:** Calls for database maintenance mandates or speed limits on targeting tempo as the obvious policy response to Baker's diagnosis. Baker identifies the exact problem but the article doesn't produce governance proposals.

**KB connections:** Direct link to the accountability vacuum claim candidate from Session 04-12. Also connects to the architectural negligence thread (Nippon Life / Stanford CodeX) — "what the company built" applies equally to military targeting system architecture.

**Extraction hints:** The claim from this source: "Military targeting systems designed for AI-enabled tempo make meaningful HITL review structurally impossible, shifting the governance problem upstream to system architecture decisions rather than point-of-strike decisions."

**Context:** Published April 9, 2026 — 40 days after the strike. Part of the wave of accountability analysis after the initial AI-focused Congressional demands (March) and Semafor's "humans not AI" reporting (March 18).

## Curator Notes (structured handoff for extractor)

PRIMARY CONNECTION: governance laundering accountability-vacuum mechanism + architectural negligence thread

WHY ARCHIVED: Baker's framing is the strongest articulation of the upstream governance problem — system design choices (speed, database maintenance, HITL ratio) are where governance should attach, not point-of-strike attribution

EXTRACTION HINT: The extractable claim is about tempo as governance gap: "systems designed for AI-enabled tempo make HITL substantive oversight structurally impossible regardless of whether humans are formally present in the loop"
