Bloomberg published an investigative report on September 20, based on accounts from U.S. officials involved in an internal Pentagon review: on the first day of the Iran war in February 2026, two Tomahawk missiles struck the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, killing more than 150 people, including at least 123 children. The internal review attributed the strike to a chain of avoidable failures, one of which was overreliance on Palantir's Maven Smart System.
According to the officials, the site had been logged in the target database as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facility, based on outdated data. Maven used that entry to include the site among the recommended targets for the first day of the war.
What Maven does, and doesn't do
Maven Smart System is a targeting-analysis platform that fuses intelligence from multiple sources. Its purpose is to compress time: target analysis that once took hours is reduced to minutes. Identifying outdated records and spotting conflicting information are not things the system does on its own — that is left to the analysts who use it. The review's finding was that some personnel within Central Command relied too heavily on the system's output at that step.
A warning had in fact existed. An intelligence analyst logged the change at the site back in 2019, but the record was entered into a database that did not connect to the authoritative intelligence system used to build strike packages, so the information never reached the people assembling the target package.
From a school built to 123 children killed
Lining up the milestones from public information:
- 2017: The school's perimeter wall and a separate entrance were built
- 2018: Satellite imagery showed playground markings and a soccer field
- 2019: An analyst logged these changes into a database not connected to the targeting system
- February 2026: On the first day of the war, two Tomahawks struck the school
- March 2026: More than 120 House Democrats jointly questioned Maven's role
- June 2026: Bloomberg reported that the analyst's assessment had not been acted on
- September 2026: A UN investigation found "reasonable grounds to believe" the U.S. had committed war crimes, citing indiscriminate attack and reckless disregard for consequences
- September 20, 2026: Details of the internal review became public through officials
Over seven years, the changes on the ground were seen and recorded — and got stuck between two systems.
The part about staffing cuts
The review also includes a set of numbers unrelated to AI. Teams within the Defense Department responsible for reducing civilian harm saw headcount fall by about 90% in the years before the war, to fewer than 20 people in total; Central Command's team shrank from 10 people to one. In other words, even as the system generated its target list, the positions meant to double-check it were being cut at the same time.
What each side says
Palantir said the company "is not responsible for the underlying data, nor for identifying intelligence gaps," and said there is no evidence its software was at fault. The Pentagon declined to comment publicly, citing an ongoing investigation, even though the report was largely finished months ago.
The account above comes from Bloomberg's reporting, based on officials with knowledge of the review; the report itself has not been made public, and outside parties cannot verify it line by line. Whether the review's conclusions will lead to changes in how Maven is procured or used has also not been officially stated.
For people building AI-assisted decision systems, the report holds one lesson that has nothing to do with the military: pulling multi-source data into a single interface looks like it eliminates information silos, but the risk it actually leaves behind is that users assume whatever appears on screen has already been verified. When the underlying data comes from systems that don't talk to each other, the cleaner the interface looks, the harder it becomes to tell which entry is out of date.
Sources: Bloomberg investigation, Gizmodo, CocoLoop, UN investigation findings; casualty figures, staffing-cut ratios and statements from involved parties are per Bloomberg's reporting.