Military · AI Beat

24 Sep 2026 · AI Beat Desk

Maven Wasn't Built to Catch This

A Pentagon investigation found that overreliance on Palantir's Maven Smart System contributed to the February strike on Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran, killing over 150 people including 123 children. The core failure: operators expected Maven to flag outdated or contradictory intelligence, but the system was never designed to do that.

12 Jun 2026 · AI Beat Desk

The Thirty Billion Scans You Didn't Know You Made

Dutch newspaper Trouw revealed that Niantic Spatial's Visual Positioning System — trained on 30 billion scans by Pokémon Go players since 2021 — has been integrated with Vantor's military drone navigation software for GPS-denied operations. Players consented to transferable data rights in optional in-game terms, but were never told of possible military use, and once data is baked into a model, tracing it back is essentially impossible.