Pentagon probe cites Palantir Maven in Iran school strike

Pentagon investigators concluded that Central Command staff leaned too hard on Palantir's Maven Smart System when they cleared a February target that turned out to be an elementary school, according to an unreleased internal review reported by Bloomberg and covered by Gizmodo.

Two Tomahawk missiles hit Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab on the opening day of the Iran war, killing more than 150 people, including at least 123 children.

The site had been cataloged as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facility based on outdated data, and Maven surfaced it as a recommended day-one target. Commercial satellite imagery from 2018 already showed "brightly painted walls, a soccer pitch, assembly rows, and playground markings." According to the review, personnel "expected Maven to flag stale records or contradictions," a function the system was not designed to perform.

The staffing gap widened after Secretary of War Pete Hegseth ordered cuts that shrank civilian harm mitigation teams by roughly 90% across the Department of Defense, to fewer than 20 people overall. Centcom's team dropped from ten people to one, and no CHM official reviewed the Minab site before launch.

A Palantir spokesperson said the company "is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies," adding there is no evidence its software was at fault. After the strike, Palantir personnel familiar with the contracts said the company added features to "re-review underlying intelligence to identify factors that would disqualify a target and flag inconsistencies and inaccuracies that human review may have missed."

The Pentagon said the incident remains under investigation. A UN fact-finding mission concluded there were "reasonable grounds" to believe the US committed a war crime through "indiscriminate attack." The full report is unreleased.