Lolwut: “Was the Iran War Caused by AI Psychosis?

[kcarruthers@infosec.exchange]

Lolwut: “Was the Iran War Caused by AI Psychosis?

AI simulations shaped Operation Epic Fury. 7 planning assumptions failed in 23 days as the Iran war defied every AI prediction.”

https://houseofsaud.com/iran-war-ai-psychosis-sycophancy-rlhf/

[aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au]

@kcarruthers Just astounding. We really are in the Idiocracy timeline, aren't we?

Hesgeth didn't just leave all the war planning to a Palantir AI system based on Claude.

He insisted that all the guardrails were "woke" and must be switched off.

And he listened to Claude's analysis over the advice of experienced intelligence officers, who warned that removing the dictator was unlikely to bring down the regime, or that Iran could restrict oil supply.

From the article:

"Hegseth made his philosophy explicit at SpaceX in mid-January: “We will judge AI models on this standard alone: factually accurate, mission-relevant, without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications. Department of War AI will not be woke.”

"The phrase “ideological constraints” performed significant rhetorical work. Safety filters designed to prevent AI hallucinations, sycophantic validation of flawed premises, and overconfident probability estimates were recast as political obstacles — “woke” limitations imposed by Silicon Valley liberals on America’s warfighters. The distinction between a guardrail that prevents an AI from endorsing a genocide and a guardrail that prevents an AI from inflating a strike’s predicted success rate was erased in a single speech.
...
"AI planning models assumed decapitating the senior leadership would trigger cascading institutional failure — IRGC fracture, Assembly of Experts deadlock, pro-reform street protests. Instead, the regime’s mosaic defence architecture — designed to survive exactly this scenario — activated as intended. By March 9, Mojtaba Khamenei had been installed as the new supreme leader, having reportedly survived the airstrike that killed his father by minutes.

"The National Intelligence Council had assessed beforehand that “even a large-scale assault would probably not collapse Iran’s clerical-military order.” This assessment had little impact. The polished, high-confidence outputs of AI simulation models proved more compelling to decision-makers than the hedged, probabilistic language of traditional intelligence analysis. As Foreign Policy noted, the succession “signals regime exhaustion” but not regime death — the IRGC backed continuity precisely because it was preferable to the chaos American planners expected to exploit."

https://houseofsaud.com/iran-war-ai-psychosis-sycophancy-rlhf/