Children are in the sights of artificial intelligence

By Sasha Costanza-Chok, special to CalMatters

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I recently watched the documentary The AI ​​Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimistwhich follows real-life filmmaker and father-to-be Daniel Rohr as he wonders if it’s a good idea to have a child aged artificial intelligence.

He interviews AI doomers — who think AI will kill us all — then AI utopians — who think it will save us all. Finally, he seeks answers from the CEOs of leading Bay Area AI companies: Sam Altman of OpenAI, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, and Dario and Daniela Amodei of Anthropic.

In one of the film’s most intense moments, Center for Humane Technologies co-founder Tristan Harris tells Rohr, “I know people working on AI risk who don’t expect their kids to make it to high school.”

This crude line illustrates a fundamental problem: the families of elementary school students recently killed in Iran already know their children won’t make it to high school. The worst things AI doomers can imagine have already happened there.

On the first day of the US-Israel war against Iran, multiple Tomahawk cruise missiles struck Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Iran. At at least 168 people were killedthe majority of them children, according to Amnesty International.

US Central Command has uses Palantir’s intelligent Maven system to identify targets during the campaign. Anthropic’s lead AI, Claude, was integrated with Palantir’s systems and was used in Iran as well as in the illegal US military operation to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

Anthropic isn’t the only artificial intelligence firm with ties to the Pentagon. In July 2025 The Pentagon awarded contracts worth up to $200 million each to Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and xAI.

Rohr puts the CEOs of these firms on camera, but never asks them about their military contracts or any of the well-documented harm from their AI systems. To be fair, the film was completed before the start of the Iran war.

But these companies building AI “kill chains” are also harming the people of California.

Campaign of a group called Cleansing Palantir highlights how Palantir powers the ICE deportation machine targeting immigrant communities across the state and country. And massive new data centers are draining California’s water and strains its energy grid during a climate crisis.

AI tenant screening algorithms drive up rents and pushing people out of their homes in California.

None of this appears in the film. AI doomers, utopians and CEOs never mention the existing harms of AI. Consequently, the film ignores the myriad ways in which communities are already holding AI companies accountable. The backlash against harmful AI systems is real and growing in California.

The Stop the LAPD Spy Coalition led the fight against predictive policing and won, forcing the Los Angeles Police Department to shut down both Operation LASER, built on the Palantir platform, and the PredPol program, which uses AI to target black and brown neighborhoods for extreme policing.

The Writers Guild of America went on strike and won ground-breaking defenses against using AI to replace creative workers.

No technology for apartheidled by Google and Amazon workers in Silicon Valley, built awareness of tech companies’ military contracts with the Israeli Defense Forces in the mass killing of Palestinian people. And in September 2025, after continued pressure on apartheid No Azure workers, Microsoft blocked Israel from using its cloud and AI services to mass surveillance of Palestinians.

In Monterey Park, residents blocked a massive AI data center and organized to put a permanent ban on voting in June 2026.

In the film, Rohr wants to know if it is a good time to bring a child into the world. Minab’s mothers in Iran want to know who will be held accountable for the AI-assisted mass murder of their children.

The question is not whether AI will harm “our” children someday. The question is whose children are already damaged. And will we seek accountability?

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.