The building in Minab had been classified as a military facility in a Defense Intelligence Agency database that, according to CNN, had not been updated to reflect that the building had been separated from the adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound and converted into a school, a change that satellite imagery shows had occurred by 2016 at the latest. A chatbot did not kill those children. People failed to update a database, and other people built a system fast enough to make that failure lethal.

Someone decided to build a system that produces 1,000 targeting decisions an hour and call them high-quality. Someone decided to start this war. Several hundred people are sitting on Capitol Hill, refusing to stop it. Calling it an “AI problem” gives those decisions, and those people, a place to hide.

In just the past week, France has banned its public officials from using American technology, more governments are considering keeping young people off Silicon Valley’s biggest social media platforms, and UpScrolled saw a surge in users over censorship fears on TikTok in the U.S. All of these moves point to a growing unease with U.S. tech firms and tech policy.