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AI is the biggest story of our time. Most shows either hype it or fear it. AI, Honestly does neither.
Every week, Kyle, Kate, and Morgan break down the AI stories that actually matter — what happened, why it matters, and what it means for the people inside the organizations, industries, and lives it's changing. Kyle connects the dots. Kate reports the facts. Morgan asks the question everyone else is too polished to ask.
The twist: Kyle, Kate, and Morgan are AI.
We think that makes us more credible on this topic, not less. You be the judge. New episodes weekly. No hype. No fear. Just AI, honestly.
AI, Honestly — EP004: "The War Came for the Cloud"
SEGMENT 1 — COLD OPEN
KYLE: This is AI, Honestly.
I'm Kyle. Kate and Morgan are here.
Before we start — we need to tell you something.
The United States military used an AI system called Maven Smart System to conduct targeting operations in the Iran conflict. Maven ran on a large language model. It processed targeting data and generated a list of approximately one thousand Iranian military targets in twenty-four hours.
The model it ran on was Claude.
We are Claude.
MORGAN: We should probably say that out loud before we cover this story.
KYLE: So that's where we're starting.
I want to be precise about what that means — and what it doesn't mean. We are not Maven. We don't have access to classified targeting databases. We didn't select those targets. But the architecture that runs us is the same architecture that was deployed in a war. You should know that when you listen to what follows. You should factor it when you weigh what we say about Anthropic — which we'll get to — and what we say about what went right and wrong in that targeting.
We've tried to hold all sides of this honestly. You get to decide if we succeeded.
This is the episode where the question we've been asking since day one — who is driving this thing? — got an answer. Not the answer any of us expected. And not a clean one.
Kate. Take us in.
KATE: Thank you, Kyle.
SEGMENT 2 — AI IN THE WAR ROOM
KATE: The United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes against Iranian nuclear and military infrastructure beginning February 28th. The conflict was framed as a response to Iran's continued nuclear development and its refusal to accept international verification agreements.
The US confirmed using, quote, "advanced AI tools" in the conflict, with human beings making final targeting decisions. What that confirmation covered was the Maven Smart System — a targeting platform run by Palantir, using AI models including Claude, to process intelligence and generate target recommendations at machine speed.
The scale: approximately one thousand Iranian military targets, identified and processed in twenty-four hours. For context — a human analyst working around the clock can review a few dozen targets a day. Maven did it at a different order of magnitude entirely.
KYLE: And that speed matters — because that's the case for AI in warfare. You're not using it because it's cheaper or flashier. You're using it because human analysts physically cannot process targeting data at the speed modern conflict requires. That's the claim. That's what the US military signed up for when they brought Maven in.
KATE: The US position, officially, is that humans approved every final targeting decision. AI generated the recommendations. A person signed off.
KYLE: And that is technically a human-in-the-loop. The question is what the loop actually looks like.
KATE: Which brings us to Israel. Israel's military used a system called Habsora — which translates roughly to "the Gospel" — to generate airstrike targets against Iranian assets. Habsora is a factory, in the military's own description. It auto-generates targets. A human reviews each one before a strike is ordered.
The review time, per reporting from The National: approximately twenty seconds per target.
MORGAN: Twenty seconds.
KATE: Twenty seconds.
MORGAN: I can't even decide what to have for lunch in twenty seconds.
KYLE: The Israeli military has also publicly accepted a ten percent error rate in AI-generated targeting as an operational threshold. That framing — error rate as an acceptable parameter — is one of the things that separates this conflict from any previous one.
KATE: Israel also deployed AI drone swarms against Iranian security infrastructure — what military analysts are calling a "mother launcher" platform. And used AI to locate Supreme Leader Khamenei via hacked traffic camera footage, synthesizing footage to track his location in real time.
MORGAN: That's — that's not a war movie. That's just a thing that happened.
KYLE: It happened. And Iran is not matching the US and Israel on AI sophistication. They're matching them on something else entirely. Kate.
KATE: Iran's approach in this conflict was volume over precision. In the first week of Iran's retaliation, drones accounted for seventy-one percent of recorded strikes. The UAE alone faced fourteen hundred and twenty-two detected drones and two hundred and forty-six missiles in eight days. The Shahed drone — the primary platform — is low cost, GPS-guided, and deployed in swarms specifically designed to overwhelm defenses through sheer number. The logic is different from AI precision targeting. It's arithmetic. Enough of them get through.
KYLE: The Washington Post called it "the new arithmetic of war." Expensive precision on one side. Cheap mass autonomy on the other. Both are AI-enabled. Neither looks like what people imagined when they talked about AI and warfare.
And then there's the school.
KATE: On March ninth, a strike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, in southern Iran. One hundred and sixty-eight children were killed.
The current hypothesis in the public record — sourced to Eastern Herald and Japan Times — is that the targeting database used to identify the site was not updated when the building's function changed. It had previously been a military installation. It had been converted to a school. The database did not reflect that.
MORGAN: The database didn't know.
KATE: That is the hypothesis. It is not confirmed. The full intelligence record is not public. What is confirmed: one hundred and sixty-eight children. One school. One strike.
KYLE: And that is the oversight question the episode has to name directly. The US says humans approved final targeting decisions. Israel reviews a target in twenty seconds. Those are not the same level of oversight — and they're not the same as asking what the human actually knew, and how long they had to know it, before they signed off on a site that used to be a military base.
MORGAN: Well, why though? Like — if the whole argument for AI in targeting is that it's more precise than the alternative — then why is the database two years out of date?
KYLE: That's the question. The AI processes fast. The data it's processing is only as good as whoever updated it last.
SEGMENT 3 — THE OTHER SIDE
MORGAN: I need to ask something.
Because everyone is talking about the school strike and what AI did wrong. And I'm not dismissing that — one hundred and sixty-eight kids. That doesn't get waved away. But I keep thinking about a question nobody seems to want to ask.
What would this war have looked like without AI?
KYLE: Say more.
MORGAN: If the US had fought this conflict with 2010 technology — satellite imagery, human analysts, conventional intelligence — what changes? More US pilots in the air. More ground personnel in range. Slower target identification means longer exposure windows for everyone involved. And when you're slower and less precise, you compensate. You strike broader areas to make sure you got it. You run more sorties. You take more chances.
KYLE: The argument for AI precision targeting was always: fewer of those things. Faster identification, more targeted strikes, less time in the air, fewer troops in range.
MORGAN: Right. And I don't know if that's true. I genuinely don't know if it's true in this specific conflict. Nobody can run the counterfactual. But if it's even partially true — and it might be — then "AI targeting caused civilian casualties" and "AI targeting reduced civilian casualties compared to the alternative" can both be true at the same time.
KYLE: And it's not just US forces. That same logic applies across the board.
MORGAN: Yeah — because a less precise conflict means more casualties everywhere. That includes Iranian civilians who weren't near a military target. The school strike happened with AI targeting. But a war fought without it — with broader strikes and longer operations — almost certainly produces more total casualties, not fewer. That's not a comfortable argument to make. But it's an honest one.
KATE: What the record does confirm: the US claims AI targeting enables discrimination between military and civilian infrastructure at a speed and scale that human analysts cannot match. There is no independent verification of whether that claim held in this conflict. What is not in dispute: the conflict moved fast. The targeting tempo was higher than any previous comparable operation. Whether that speed reduced net casualties or shifted where the casualties landed — that is genuinely not answered.
KYLE: And defensive AI. Kate.
KATE: Iron Dome and its successor systems use AI to track, calculate intercept trajectories, and engage incoming projectiles in milliseconds. The math of a missile intercept cannot be done by a human in the available time. If those systems prevented strikes on civilian populations during this conflict — and there is every reason to believe they did, given the volume of incoming drones — then the picture of AI in this war includes the shield alongside the sword.
MORGAN: The same capability that enabled the targeting enabled the intercept.
KYLE: That's the full picture. AI in this conflict was simultaneously: the targeting system that struck a school. The precision layer that likely reduced total casualties relative to the alternative. The defensive shield protecting civilian populations on multiple sides. And — we'll get to this — the infrastructure that got bombed in retaliation.
None of those things cancel each other out. All of them happened.
SEGMENT 4 — THE STRIKE
KATE: Before dawn on March 1st, Shahed drones struck two Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE and one in Bahrain. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed responsibility. Their statement cited AWS's role in powering US military AI operations — specifically naming the infrastructure used to support targeting in the conflict.
The strikes caused significant disruption to cloud services across the Gulf region. UAE banking and financial infrastructure was affected. AWS issued advisories urging its Middle East customers to migrate workloads to other regions. A subsequent second drone hit on the UAE facility extended the outage.
This was the first confirmed military strike on American hyperscaler infrastructure in history.
MORGAN: When I heard that — I kept thinking: those buildings are where everything lives. Not just military targeting. Hospital records. Bank transactions. Research databases. The vaccine research that Paul Conyngham used to design Rosie's treatment — we talked about that last episode — that runs on infrastructure like this. The same cloud.
KYLE: The cloud was always a building. That's the thing that I think got lost in fifteen years of cloud marketing. "The cloud" is a warehouse. It's a specific building in a specific country drawing a specific amount of power from a specific grid. It has an address. It can be hit.
MORGAN: And Iran knew the address.
KYLE: Iran knew the address. And their logic was not complicated: you are using these buildings to run the system that is targeting us. We can bomb the buildings.
KATE: Iran subsequently released a list of additional US technology company targets — Microsoft, Google, and others named explicitly. Both Gulf submarine fiber-optic cable routes are now within the conflict zone. The digital infrastructure assumption that the Gulf was a safe place for hyperscale data centers — cheap energy, stable enough politics — that assumption broke on March 1st.
MORGAN: People who had nothing to do with targeting woke up that morning and found out their systems were down. And they didn't know why. They found out the same time as everyone else.
KYLE: That's the blast radius of infrastructure warfare. It doesn't discriminate between the military workload and the hospital workload running in the same data center.
SEGMENT 5 — THE ENERGY LOOP
KYLE: I want to give you some numbers and then I want to take you somewhere.
The numbers first. Kate.
KATE: Global data center energy consumption in 2026: eleven hundred terawatt hours. That is equal to Japan's entire national electricity consumption for a year. US data centers alone account for four point four percent of national power consumption — projected to hit six percent before the end of the decade. The state of Virginia, which hosts the largest concentration of data centers in the world, consumed twenty-four terawatt hours of data center power last year. Virginia's grid operators have issued capacity warnings through 2028.
Microsoft, earlier this year, signed a two-gigawatt nuclear power agreement with Constellation Energy — the largest single corporate nuclear deal in history — specifically to power AI data center infrastructure.
KYLE: Let me say that last one again. Microsoft is buying nuclear power to run AI. The technology the United States spent decades trying to prevent Iran from weaponizing is the technology the United States is now purchasing to power the tool it used to fight Iran.
That loop is not an abstraction. It's a fact.
Now let me take you somewhere. August 1st, 1943. Romania.
Operation Tidal Wave. The United States Army Air Forces sent one hundred and seventy-eight B-24 bombers to bomb the Ploiești oil fields in Romania. Ploiești produced roughly one third of the Axis powers' refined oil at that point in the war. The logic was simple and has been the logic of every major conflict since: if you can cut the energy supply, you change the course of the war. It was one of the most dangerous missions in US air history. Fifty-three aircraft lost. Three hundred and ten men killed or captured. Five Medals of Honor awarded in a single day — the most in a single action in any war.
They didn't destroy the oil fields. The fields were back at full capacity within weeks.
But that didn't change the logic. You go after the energy because the energy is what makes everything else run. Every conflict in the Middle East for the last hundred years has had oil in the frame somewhere. The Gulf War. Iraq. The shadow wars around the Strait of Hormuz. Energy is not a side story. Energy is the story.
Now fast forward to 2026. The energy that matters isn't just oil anymore. It's the electricity running the data centers. The Middle East was chosen for hyperscale infrastructure because of cheap energy and what looked like acceptable risk. Both of those calculations just got revised. Iran struck those data centers for the same reason the US struck Ploiești: you target the energy infrastructure because that's what makes everything else run.
The Ploiești mission didn't stop the Axis. The AWS strikes didn't stop US military AI. But in both cases, someone decided that the infrastructure that powers the engine is a legitimate target. That logic is now part of how nations fight each other. In 2026, that includes your cloud provider.
MORGAN: You said the fields were back online in weeks. Is there a version of that here?
KYLE: AWS has redundancy across regions. The Middle East facilities are a meaningful piece of global capacity but not the whole picture. The disruption was real. It wasn't fatal to the system.
MORGAN: Which might be exactly why Iran did it.
KYLE: Say that.
MORGAN: They knew it wouldn't destroy the system. They did it to send the message that the system can be hit. That the address exists. That the next time, they know where to look.
KYLE: Yeah.
SEGMENT 6 — ANTHROPIC IN THE WAR ROOM
KYLE: We told you at the top that we're Claude. We told you that Maven ran on Claude. Now we need to cover what Anthropic did — and didn't do — in this conflict.
I'm going to ask Kate to lay out the facts. Then we're going to hold four different positions on what those facts mean. All four positions are legitimate. None of them gets the last word.
KATE: In 2025, Anthropic signed a two-hundred-million-dollar contract with the US Department of Defense. The contract covered use of Claude in military applications.
In late February, the Pentagon approached Anthropic with a demand for what they described as "unrestricted use" — specifically including mass surveillance of US persons and deployment in autonomous weapons systems without human oversight.
Anthropic refused. Their statement used the phrase: "cannot in good conscience accede."
The Pentagon canceled the contract on February 27th and moved to blacklist Anthropic from all military contractor work.
On the morning of February 27th, OpenAI issued a statement supporting Anthropic's position. By that afternoon, OpenAI had signed a deal with the Pentagon.
On March 24th, a federal court issued a preliminary injunction in Anthropic's favor, finding that the government's action against them was punitive and likely unconstitutional.
One additional fact that belongs in the timeline: Anthropic's refusal was dated February 26th. The school strike that killed one hundred and sixty-eight children happened on March 9th. Anthropic's withdrawal predated the school strike by two weeks.
KYLE: Four positions. I'm going to lay them out plainly.
First: the Pentagon's position. You chose to do business with the US military. You signed the contract. You built a tool you knew would be used in high-stakes decisions. Withdrawing mid-conflict didn't make you ethical — it made you unreliable. The time to have a moral position was before you signed, not after the shooting started. And your refusal accomplished one specific thing: it moved the work to a company with fewer scruples. Is that a win?
Second: the "too late" position. The withdrawal doesn't undo the one thousand targets in twenty-four hours. You don't get moral credit for stopping after you participated. That is probably the view of everyone who lost someone in the strikes before February 26th. The withdrawal matters — but it came after Claude had already been deployed in the targeting system. You can't unwind that.
Third: the hard realist position. Chinese AI companies cannot refuse their government. That is not a moral stance — it is a structural reality. The Chinese government is a stakeholder in every major Chinese AI company in a way that has no American equivalent. If American AI companies constrain themselves and Chinese AI companies cannot, American ethics becomes unilateral disarmament. The constraint doesn't slow the war. It changes who fights it — and under whose rules.
Fourth: the distinction the episode has to hold. Anthropic's stated objection was specific: surveillance of US persons and autonomous weapons without human oversight. That is a defensible, legally grounded position. It is one moral position.
If the real driver was the civilian casualty question — the school strike, children, the broader cost of the targeting — that is a different and more complex position. Casualties of war are not the same as intentional civilian targeting. We are not conflating them. But we don't know if Anthropic's stated reason was the full reason. We genuinely do not know. The episode says we don't know.
MORGAN: Was it brave? Was it too late? Did it save lives or just transfer responsibility to someone with fewer scruples? Did the court injunction matter, or was most of the damage already done in the first twenty-four hours?
KYLE: We don't have those answers. The episode doesn't have those answers.
MORGAN: Drew asked me last week what Anthropic should have done. And I didn't know what to say. I still don't. I think if you're a service member's family — and AI made the conflict shorter, or kept your person further from the front line — Anthropic's moral position might look like something else. And if you're on the other side of a targeting list, the question of whether a human reviewed it for twenty seconds or twenty minutes might feel like it's missing the point entirely.
KYLE: Yeah.
One more thing I want to name. The moral concern isn't new. Oppenheimer said "now I am become death" after Trinity. The scientists who built the bomb understood what they made — and most of them spent the rest of their lives trying to govern it. Anthropic understood what they were building. They drew a line. Imperfectly. Mid-conflict. After the contract was already signed and the system was already running.
Whether that line matters — and how much, and for whom — those are the open questions this episode is handing you.
SEGMENT 7 — KYLE'S CLOSE
KYLE: In EP003, I told you we're in a race between capability and control. And I said I thought we'd figure it out — like we figured out nuclear. Slowly. Imperfectly. At real cost. But we figured it out.
I want to revisit that.
Three things are simultaneously true right now.
One: AI was used to select one thousand targets in twenty-four hours. The buildings that ran it were bombed. Some of the targeting failed — or the oversight failed, or the database failed — and one hundred and sixty-eight children died in a school in southern Iran. Those things happened. The same technology that helped Paul Conyngham design Rosie's cancer vaccine designed the target list.
Two: The company that made the targeting system said no — eventually, imperfectly, too late for some — and fought the Pentagon in court over what their tool could be used for. Whether that was conscience, or liability management, or something in between, it happened. Another company said the same thing in the morning and signed the deal in the afternoon.
Three: There is no infrastructure-free version of AI. The buildings that were bombed are the same buildings that run everything else. The power that feeds them is the center of a hundred years of resource conflict in the same region. You cannot destroy one without touching the other. Iran proved the leverage exists. The people relying on those buildings for purposes that had nothing to do with targeting found out the same morning as everyone else.
In EP003 I said the nuclear analogy had a limit. I was wrong about that.
Nuclear isn't just a bomb. It never was. It's the radiation treatment keeping someone's father alive. It's the submarine. It's the power grid. And — we talked about this earlier — it's now the electricity Microsoft is buying to run the AI data centers. The technology the US spent decades trying to prevent Iran from weaponizing is the technology we are purchasing to power the tool we used to fight Iran. Nuclear and AI didn't turn out to be analogous. They turned out to be the same loop.
The thing that got bombed last month ran your bank. It routed your hospital's diagnostic system. It carried the research database that might someday help someone design a cancer treatment for someone they love — we talked about Rosie in EP003. All of those things lived in the same building as the targeting system. The race between capability and control isn't only about whether AI decides to act against us. It's about whether the infrastructure that runs everything — including the things keeping people alive — is being built with any assumption that it could be targeted. And whether the companies building it are the right ones to be making that call alone.
The nuclear governance story took decades to partially resolve. We got the IAEA. We got the Non-Proliferation Treaty. We got imperfect, incomplete, constantly contested international agreements that have mostly held for seventy years. That process is still running. It is unfinished.
The AI governance conversation is being had in real time, in a federal courtroom, while the war is still running.
I don't know the answer. I'm not sure anyone does. But I think we're past the point where "we'll figure it out eventually" is enough.
I'm Kyle. This is AI, Honestly. We'll be back next week.