U.S. has struck more than 5,500 targets inside Iran, Central Command says

The U.S. has hit more than 5,500 targets inside Iran, including over 60 ships, “using a variety of precision weapon systems,” Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command, said Wednesday in a video update on the war with Iran.

“Strikes waves” took place nearly every hour Tuesday, hitting Iran from different locations and directions, he said, adding that the U.S. destroyed the last of Iran’s four Soleimani-class warships.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had said that Tuesday would be the “most intense day” of strikes against Iran since the war began on Feb. 28.

Cooper said U.S. forces were “leveraging a variety of advanced AI tools” that help them sift through vast amounts of data in seconds and make decisions faster than the enemy can react.

“Humans will always make final decisions on what to shoot and what not to shoot and when to shoot, but advanced AI tools can turn processes that used to take hours, and sometimes even days, into seconds,” he said.

His comments on AI come after a memo showed the Defense Department officially notified senior leadership figures throughout the U.S. military that they must remove Anthropic’s artificial intelligence products from their systems within 180 days. The memo was dated March 6, a day after the Pentagon formally designated Anthropic a supply chain risk. Anthropic is currently the only AI company whose models are deployed on the Pentagon’s classified systems.