
Alok Mehta
Indian journalist
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Mar 30, 2026
AI is playing a big role in the US-led war in Iran
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4:10Dana TaylorHOST
Alok, what guardrails are there for ensuring that a target is a legitimate military one and not, say, a girls' school, as happened on day one of the conflict?
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4:20Aalok MehtaGUEST
So the, the US military has a directive that o-o-oversees or, or provides guidance on how it's able to use autonomy in, um, in military systems, and this directive, DoD Directive three thousand dot zero nine, lays out some of the ways that is appropriate and not appropriate for the military to use autonomous systems, essentially.
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4:44Aalok MehtaGUEST
And the key text here is that it requires an appropriate level of human judgment in decisions, especially decisions that have high consequences, like use of lethal force on the battlefield.
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4:57Aalok MehtaGUEST
And so what is happening is that the military almost certainly has human oversight over selection and actual execution of military strikes on targets.
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5:10Aalok MehtaGUEST
To the best of our understanding, this particular situation with the school was an issue not with the particular use of AI in this instance, but issues with the underlying data.
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5:22Aalok MehtaGUEST
Essentially, I think the, the latest intelligence we have is that there were errors in the database that this site had previously been sort of a military installation, and its use had been transformed, it had been turned into a school, and our systems, our various data feeds, had not fully incorporated that.
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5:40Aalok MehtaGUEST
And so that sort of persistent error in the data continued to make its way through the system, and it ultimately led to the circumstance in which the school was targeted.
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6:09Dana TaylorHOST
Can you talk me through that distinction and how that plays out on the battlefield?