The high-tech assassination that reveals Trump's deadly threat to his enemies

Is the article AI? Maduro wasn't killed.

2. The AI detection showed up on the map, too. The dot moved through Barisha. At a T-junction, it turned to the west, heading toward the site of the raid a thousand or so feet away. The taskforce commander put the information together fast: Those guys are driving toward our guys at the building. The US didn’t think they would be Isis, but knew there were other militant groups in the area and the vehicle displayed what General \[Kenneth\] McKenzie would later describe as “hostile intent”. The task force commander radioed the ground force commander in charge of the raid about the vehicle. The ground force commander called in a hit: Take it out. Thirty seconds later an attack helicopter swooped in. Gunfire rained down. A man ran out of the van to a roofless building on the edge of the road. The helicopter fired a strafing run, blowing out the north and west walls of the building. Five minutes later, the airships launched a rocket. “And the van is gone,” the person familiar with the raid recalled. The van’s pockmarked carcass, blackened with smoke, remained on the roadside. It was the first time that the commander had used AI to help find a target. It couldn’t have happened on a more consequential, fast-moving and dangerous raid. The speed at which AI highlighted the vehicle left an impression with JSOC \[Joint Special Operations Command\]. “Someone just made their company a lot of money,” the commander remarked. AI appeared able to cut through the fog of war. The task force commander and others started leaning wholesale into Project Maven’s technology. What, I asked the person familiar with the feed, if there’d been civilians in or near the vehicle spotted by the AI? “Those were definitely bad guys that the AI ended up picking up,” the person told me. Barakat Ahmad Barakat told a different story. He told \[US media outlet\] NPR he’d been driving home to Hatan, a village several miles west of Baghdadi’s compound, after finishing his day’s work at an olive press in Barisha with two friends. “Suddenly I felt something hit us,” the 30-year-old told NPR. The van stopped and the men fled. His friends — two cousins, Khaled Mustafa Qurmo and Khaled Abdel Majid Qurmo — died in the aerial attack that followed. Barakat cradled one of them in his lap on the roadside, as an air strike arrived. It blew off his right hand. He later lost his arm. His left hand doesn’t work well. “I’m just a civilian. I didn’t have any weapons,” Barakat told NPR. “We’re farmers. I make less than a dollar a day. Now I’m handicapped, and my two friends are in their graves.” The US has acknowledged 1,437 civilians were unintentionally killed in five years of operations against Isis in Iraq and Syria to the end of October 2019. According to Barakat, that number should be at least two higher. (The monitoring group Airwars has logged the total number of civilians killed to be higher possibly than 8,000.) The US military has investigated the claims twice: the first report did not uphold the claims. But after NPR sued to see a redacted version and questioned conclusions, the US did a second investigation. The results of the second report have not been made public. [The rise of AI warfare](https://inews.co.uk/news/world/remote-drones-computer-targeting-horrors-modern-war-4312637?srsltid=AfmBOooAzlSQ0xxVnH9GuaAEchoMRx9fXGtE9XRbQXshI-1aKTHsinjH&ico=in-line_link) speaks to the biggest moral and practical question there is: who – or what – gets to decide to take a human life? And who bears that cost? Cheerleaders argue that AI and the automation it makes possible will save lives. They claim algorithms bring a precision to decision-making that will limit civilian and friendly-fire casualties. They argue AI-empowered systems could deter conflict with China — or help win the Third World War, in which automated machines will putatively run combat at a pace faster than humans can understand. Detractors think AI has already led to civilian deaths, will spread uncontrolled destruction, and potentially [hasten the end of the world](https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/ai-weapons-turn-against-humans-kill-civilians-indiscriminately-2516893?srsltid=AfmBOorxN7y9bMEpNb1qbjib_yB0q7-SjpWbi7FnpjtUWoQCXUEhsGui&ico=in-line_link). Still more think the claims made for AI war tools are grandiose and the truth will be more prosaic, suffering from problems of rickety infrastructure, adoption and trust. Pragmatic supporters argue an incremental mix of humans and machines will forge that trust. The problem with many theories about AI warfare is just that: they remain theoretical. The AI decision-making systems developed under Maven, and some of the Pentagon’s 800 other AI projects, are now used on the battlefield. Maven Smart System (MSS), a software platform that develops targets with the help of AI, is now deployed in every branch of the US military and all over the world. Nato started using a version of the system in the spring of 2025, and I would learn in October 2025 that 10 Nato members were lining up to use it for their militaries. Maven has sped up the pace of war. I learned from an official at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency that with the help of computer vision the US went from being able to hit under a 100 targets a day to being able to hit 1,000. In combination with large language models (LLMs) integrated into the Maven platform, that has risen to 5,000. The AI algorithms developed under Maven now deploy in submarines and space operations. They’re in subsea sonar systems belonging to America and two of its closest intelligence allies (the UK and Australia) designed for nuclear deterrence. They’re fielded on autonomous drone boats. They live in secretive aerial and aquatic systems that could surveil, select and kill targets, intended for the defence of Taiwan. The US will have to carefully define use cases, guardrails and doctrine if it wants to stick to the Geneva Conventions and avoid shooting civilians and allied forces.