September 25, 2026
It was just this month which saw the Iran conflict spill over into a renewed fight between the Saudi coalition and Yemen's Houthi rebels. Now Iran is threatening to expand the fight further, even into the Indian Ocean.
Yahya Rahim Safavi, an adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, warned Thursday of another significant expanse of the war if the Islamic Republic suffers attack again.
"Since the conflict has spread from the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz to the Red Sea, it is possible that, in response to more war, the front will expand even further, reaching the Indian Ocean and perhaps beyond," said Safavi in a video published by Iran's Fars news agency.
This marks the first time that an adviser to Iran's supreme leader explicitly mentioned hitting targets in the Indian Ocean as a heightened military threat.
The strategic British military base at Diego Garcia, which is also heavily used by the United States, lies deep in the Indian Ocean - some 2400 miles away.
The Iranians are believed to have actually fired ICBMs on the base at the height of Trump's Operation Epic Fury.
Diego Garcia was first targeted on March 21st, with The Wall Street Journal at the time reporting that one missile had a mid-flight malfunction, while the other was engaged by an SM-3 interceptor missile fired from a US Navy vessel, though it's unclear whether this latter projectile ever hit its target.
Brent surged to around $106 after a military adviser to Iran's supreme leader said Tehran may expand the war to the Indian Ocean if the US or Israel attacks again, further undercutting hopes of a deal. -Bloomberg
Iranian negotiators are vowing they will not back off Tehran's firm conditions for ending the war, after this week sitting down with the US team in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. Meanwhile another attack on the Saudi kingdom by the Houthis:
Saudi led coalition in Yemen says it intercepted six ballistic missiles launched by Iran-backed Houthis
"They broke the agreement and committed another vicious act. We have therefore toughened our conditions," spokesman for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Brig. Gen. Hossein Mohbi told AFP in an interview this week. He also said that if the US doesn't change its trajectory, it "will only make things difficult for themselves".
"We are not their playthings, and they cannot unilaterally violate an agreement they signed whenever they please," he emphasized.
Bloomberg just dropped the most disturbing investigation I have read this year, and every AI builder should read it and take it seriously.
On February 28, two Tomahawk missiles hit an elementary school in Minab, a small town in southern Iran. 156 people died. At least 123 were children. The Pentagon knew within hours that it had bombed a school.
The school had its own website. It was labeled on Google Maps. You could see the soccer pitch from a satellite view. You could see the brightly painted walls. Any 12-year-old with a browser could tell what the building was.
The AI system could not.
Inside US Central Command, personnel were using Palantir's Maven Smart System. It is an AI targeting platform running on a $1.3 billion Pentagon contract, and embedded inside it is Anthropic's Claude.
On day one of the war, more than 1,000 targets went through it in 24 hours. Work that used to take a team hours per target got compressed into minutes.
The satellite imagery Maven was pulling from was seven years old. The site was still tagged in the database as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard facility.
The system spat it out as a recommended day-one target. Humans signed off. The first missile flew. Then a second one landed minutes later to hit the people who came to help.
Investigators later found that some Central Command staff had assumed Maven would flag stale intelligence for them. It did not. Nobody had told it to.
Palantir told Bloomberg the government is responsible for the underlying data. The Pentagon's civilian harm mitigation team, the people whose actual job is to catch a target like this, had been cut back before the war started.
This is not AI going rogue. This is the opposite.
This is AI doing exactly what it was built to do at exactly the speed it was built to do it. And a school full of little girls got vaporized because the humans in the loop trusted the machine more than they trusted their own eyes.
I keep thinking about the version of this story that comes next. What happens when the system is faster. When the target list is not 1,000 in a day but 10,000. When "review" becomes a button the operator has three seconds to hit before the next target loads. When there is no human left slow enough to notice that a soccer pitch is not a helipad.
We are not talking about a spam filter mislabeling an email. We are talking about a system that turned a seven-year-old database entry into two cruise missiles landing on children in the middle of a morning class.
A UN-backed panel has now called it a potential war crime.
In terms of children killed, it is the deadliest American targeting error of the entire 21st century. And according to Bloomberg, some of Defense Secretary Hegseth's own advisors are worried that too much public scrutiny of Maven might slow down its adoption inside the Pentagon.
Read that last line again.
If you build this stuff, you own what it does. You do not get to hide behind "the government owns the data." The whole pitch of your product is that speed and integration save lives. When it takes them instead, that is also on you.
I am not against AI in defense. I am against AI in a hurry. Speed is the entire mechanism that made Minab possible. Every guardrail we already know how to build takes time, and time is exactly what the system was designed to eliminate.
So here is the question I have not been able to stop asking, and I genuinely want to know what you think.
If a piece of software helped kill 123 children in a single morning while behaving exactly as designed, what does "responsible AI" even mean anymore?
- Ihtesham Ali (@ihteshamali) September 23, 2026
"We believe we have won this war, and we are currently consolidating that victory into a total deterrent force," he added.
This article was originally published on Zero Hedge.