AI Firms' Ethical Red Lines Collapse in Wartime

Opening

Dear reader, you’ve probably seen last week’s news about the US airstrikes on Iran. But something else caught my eye as I read the coverage. The core tool behind an operation that struck more than 1,000 targets in its first 24 hours turned out to be the very same AI model we use every day to draft emails and write code. Anthropic’s Claude, running through Palantir’s Maven Smart System¹, was used by the US military for intelligence analysis, target identification, and combat scenario simulation. And this happened the day after President Trump had declared a ban on Anthropic’s use across federal agencies.

Do the “ethical principles” AI companies have championed actually hold up in wartime? What this episode revealed is a massive gap between principle and reality.

From Project Maven to the Iran War — An Eight-Year Trajectory

This story starts in 2017. The US Department of Defense’s Project Maven was an effort to use AI to identify objects in drone footage, and Google won the contract at the time.

But in March 2018, more than 4,000 Google employees signed an internal petition arguing that “Google’s technology should not be used to kill people,” and a dozen or so employees actually quit over it. Google eventually told the Pentagon it would not continue, and that same year it withdrew from bidding on a $10 billion Pentagon cloud contract, saying it couldn’t be certain the deal aligned with its own AI principles.

Palantir stepped into the space Google vacated. It formed a consortium with AWS to handle software development, but progress was slow. The turning point came in 2024, when Anthropic partnered with Palantir and the Maven Smart System was completed — Claude was placed on top of the Palantir platform.

One thing worth noting here: by the time Anthropic signed that 2024 partnership, it already knew its technology would be integrated into the Defense Department’s drone operations system — the exact role Google had refused eight years earlier.