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==The “Safest” AI Company Is Reportedly Linked to a Strike That Killed 120 Iran Schoolgirls••
FLI’s Summer 2026 AI Safety Index finds the industry reversing its military bans, doing a 180 on red lines and flunking existential safety metrics among open & closed models. Max Tegmark & Sabina Nong,NIHAL J. KRISHAN
JUL 09, 2026
The safest AI company in the world, according to independent experts who evaluate these things, is also the one answering questions about whether its technology helped target a girls’ school in Iran with missiles.
That is the contradiction at the heart of the Future of Life Institute’s Summer 2026 AI Safety Index, released this week. Anthropic tops the rankings again, leading five of six domains on transparency, safety frameworks, and governance. It is also the company the review panel singled out for “questionable military engagements”— including a reported link, first surfaced by the Washington Post, to the Minab school strike in Iran that killed around 120 girls on the first day of the war.
Pressed by Bloomberg on his company’s possible role, CEO Dario Amodeiconceded he didn’t know how the Anthropic system had been used, while maintaining that even such a use “doesn’t even violate our red lines,” because a human retained the final decision.
If the best student in the class is in that position, consider the rest of the room. ==Seven independent AI and governance experts graded nine companies from the US, China, and Europe across 37 indicators. Anthropic’s chart-topping grade is a C+. OpenAI and Google DeepMind earn Cs, Meta a D+, and three companies — xAI, DeepSeek, and Mistral — fail outright with Fs.=•
“AI companies are sprinting toward a cliff,” MIT professor and FLI chair Max Tegmark told me.
“Despite acknowledging the great [existential] risks of artificial superintelligence, they continue racing to build it.Voluntary commitments were never going to be enough.”
Start with the military reversal, the starkest finding. From 2024 to 2026, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta —all of which once banned military applications — reversed course and embraced defense partnerships. “All of these companiesused to say that they weren’t going to do AI for killing people,” Tegmark said.“And then, one after the other, they dropped this stuff. Every single one.”
Anthropic’s case is the most tangled. In February it refused the Pentagon’s demand for unrestricted use of its models, forfeiting the contract. Yet its red lines prohibit only fully autonomous weapons and mass surveillance — not AI-assisted targeting.
Sabina Nong, the FLI researcher who led the Index’s evidence-gathering, sees the flaw plainly: the safeguards are drawn around use cases, not outcomes. “Even if Claude actually made a mistake there,” she told me from the report’s launch in Seoul, “it’s not against the red lines.”
The same pattern — commitments that soften on contact with competition — runs through the industry’s safety frameworks. Tegmark recalls how the pledges were sold: “They were like, ‘No, no, no — a promise is a promise.’ But sure enough, they’ve all broken promises now.”
Nong walked me through the fine print: a few versions back, Anthropic’s responsible scaling policy “actually promised to pause unilaterally once certain safeguard thresholds are crossed. In the newest RSP (Responsible Scaling Policy), they’re only going to consider such pauses if their competitors do the same.”
OpenAI attached similar conditions; Google DeepMind and Meta, which had both pledged unilateral pauses, “voided those commitments entirely.” Even the labs’ recent public calls for a coordinated pause are, per the report, so heavily conditioned — no one willing to move first, no defined trigger, no adjudicator — that reviewers dismissed them as rhetoric that has “undermined safety frameworks across the board.”
Nong’s diagnosis is unsparing: “Corporate self-governance is just in itself inadequate. They’re just going to take back their promises more and more.”….
https://nihalkrishan.substack.com/p/the-safest-ai-company-is-reportedly