\n<\/p>\n
Palantir and 8VC co-founder Joe Lonsdale at his home in Woodside, California.<\/span>Christie Hemm Klok\/The Washington Post\/Getty<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Joe Lonsdale, a cofounder <\/span>of weapons-tech company Palantir, shared some of his thoughts on America\u2019s AI-assisted warfare<\/a> at a Reuters<\/em>-hosted event <\/a>late last week\u2014and one statement stands out as being particularly alarming. The US strike on a girls\u2019 school in Minab, Iran, in February was tragic, he acknowledged\u2014but, he argued, \u201cIt\u2019s very easy to judge things from the outside.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt could be the case that somebody made 99 really good choices and then one bad choice and it led to a horrible thing,\u201d Lonsdale told Reuters Global Defense Editor Joe Brock on Friday, in a talk aimed at investors. He also argued that Iran might have deliberately lured the US military into the AI-assisted targeting of two Tomahawk missiles at an elementary school on the first day of the the Trump administration\u2019s war in Iran. The attack killed more than 150 people, most of whom were children. Pentagon officials later told Bloomberg News<\/em> that overreliance on Palantir technology<\/a> contributed to the school strike.<\/p>\n Lonsdale\u2019s narrative was different. Iran\u2019s leaders \u201cmight have purposely disguised some of these things to make them look like targets, the same way the Palestinians and others do,\u201d Lonsdale said. <\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re getting global sympathy by getting us to hit things,\u201d Lonsdale went on. \u201cAnd so, it\u2019s very unclear to me the facts of exactly what happened. Obviously, it\u2019s terrible what happened to those children.\u201d Last week, a UN committee report suggested that the US attack on the school could be classified as a war crime.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very easy to judge things from the outside.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n At one point, Lonsdale was asked how technology companies should be held accountable \u201cif things go wrong.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cMaybe there should be some laws about companies that operate here and, like, what you\u2019re allowed to do with them,\u201d Lonsdale said. <\/p>\n But the billionaire colleague of Peter Thiel has some obvious financial reasons not to push harder to regulate or hold accountable defense and technology companies. As managing partner of the venture capital firm 8VC, he has $6 billion invested<\/a> in high-tech defense companies, Forbes<\/em> reported. He\u2019s also increasingly involved in lobbying on industry issues. His conservative think tank, the Cicero Institute,<\/a> and its lobbying arm Cicero Action\u2014best-known for being a major force behind the Trump administration\u2019s push to criminalize homelessness<\/a>\u2014are also connected to hundreds of thousands of dollars in defense-lobby spending.<\/p>\n That lobbying, as Sludge<\/em> reported<\/a>, <\/strong>touches on companies in Lonsdale\u2019s 8VC portfolio\u2014and could be paying big dividends. \u201cPalantir is seeing a surge<\/a> in federal revenue under the Trump administration,\u201d Sludge <\/em>said in August, including an Army contract worth up to $10 billion<\/a>. Anduril, a Thiel-funded company also backed by Lonsdale, \u201cis similarly on the rise<\/a>, including an Army deal awarded in March with a ceiling of $20 billion<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n