If AI-Enabled Weapons Are So Smart, Why Do They Keep Hitting Schools?
From Omnishambles by Virginia Heffernan and Cy Canterel
April 20, 2026 · 60 min · Season 1 · Episode 3
About this episode
The episode discusses the implications of AI-enabled weapons, focusing on Project Maven and its impact on civilian safety.
On Feb. 28, a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, was struck three times during school hours. The roof collapsed, killing between 175 and 180 people—most of them girls aged 7 to 12. The U.S. eventually confirmed it had hit the site. This week, Cy takes Virginia (and you) deep inside Project Maven—the Pentagon’s AI-powered targeting system, how it was built, who built it, and why the school was just the tip of a very bloody iceberg. What we cover: * The origin story: Marine intelligence officer Drew Cukor in Afghanistan in 2001, blind on the battlefield with nothing but Microsoft Office and Google Earth, and his two-decade obsession with solving that with technology. * How Palantir—Peter Thiel’s data company, bootstrapped with CIA venture capital—became the backbone of the most expensive targeting system in U.S. military history. And why they nearly didn’t make it. * What a kill chain actually is, why compressing it was always the point, and how layering large language models into Maven took targeting from 20 targets a day to 5,000. * The Millennium Challenge war game of 2002 — a $250 million exercise where a retired Marine general sank the U.S. fleet in 10 minutes. * How Pete Hegseth…
People in this episode
Hosts: Virginia Heffernan, Cy Canterel
Topics covered
- AI in warfare
- military technology
- civilian casualties
- Project Maven
- targeting systems
- Palantir
- ethical implications of AI
Keywords
- AI weapons
- Project Maven
- civilian harm
- targeting systems
- Palantir
- Drew Cukor
- Pete Hegseth
- Millennium Challenge
- military ethics
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Palantir, CIA
Places: Minab, Iran
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