I did a AI deep dive into what happened to the gold that the US military got from Iraq

[LiberalArkie]

Last edited Sat Mar 7, 2026, 12:02 PM - Edit history (1)

From Bing:

What Actually Happened to Iraq’s Gold in 2003?

The gold was seized, placed in a Kuwaiti vault, then transferred to Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The gold was sold for an unknown price and the profit was sent to Iraq

🟡 What the CPA Did With Iraq’s Recovered Gold
1. 📦 Secured and Catalogued the Gold
After U.S. forces recovered gold bars in 2003 (often from trucks fleeing Baghdad or Kirkuk), the assets were:
Logged and weighed
Stored in secure U.S. military facilities
Documented as Iraqi state property
The CPA was legally responsible for managing Iraqi assets under UN Security Council Resolution 1483, which gave it authority to receive and administer state funds and property.
2. 🏛️ Transferred Gold Into the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI)
The CPA consolidated all recovered Iraqi state assets—including gold, cash, and valuables—into the DFI, a fund created by the UN to:
Pay Iraqi civil servants
Rebuild infrastructure
Stabilize the new government

This fund replaced Saddam-era accounts and was overseen by the CPA until June 2004.
nspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR)
…none of these bodies ever published:
a gold sale record
a sale price
a sale date
a bullion weight or purity breakdown
a buyer or auction details
This is unusual, because the DFI’s oil revenues and cash transfers were documented in detail.

From Claude:

The bigger financial scandal:
Nearly $12 billion in cash was withdrawn from the DFI account at the Federal Reserve — the largest cash withdrawals in history — with more than $281 million in individual currency notes sent on 484 pallets weighing 363 tons. GovInfo The U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction later found the Department of Defense could not properly account for $8.7 billion of DFI funds. Tech ARP

Bottom line: The DFI was real, the Federal Reserve connection was real, and the financial mismanagement was very real and documented. But the specific claim that Iraq's gold was sold by the Federal Reserve with proceeds deposited to the DFI is not supported by official records. The DFI was funded primarily by oil revenues, not gold sales. I cannot confirm a figure for a gold sale transaction because the evidence doesn't support that specific sequence of events.

[jmbar2]

1. Interesting question and response

AI vigilantes will be on their way in 3...2...1...

[highplainsdem]

4. It's a response from a chatbot that can hallucinate at any time. Unless you check every detail of the

answer, you don't know if it's correct. It's just AI slop.

[Bobstandard]

2. Which makes me think of the disappearing pallets of dollars

I remember that the Bush/Cheney administration shipped in plane loads of pallets of brand new US currency to pay for ‘stuff’ in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war. They had a twenty something, never done anything like this administration appointee in charge. Literal tons of cash disappeared. Shrugs all around.

Can we not let them get away with this shit this time? I know they’re going to do it. Kushner is already on it, I’m sure. But if we win in 2026 and ‘28, can we please, please go back after these robbers?

[highplainsdem]

3. Correction: You asked a hallucinating chatbot to answer a question. That isn't a deep dive. It's fake research.

You didn't identify the AI used.

Since you didn't say you checked every single detail of its answer, it's safest to assume you didn't.

Which means you offloaded factchecking to anyone reading that AI slop, taking zero responsibility for dumping possible misinformation onto DUers.

And by not identifying the AI tool, you made it impossible for anyone wanting to see if that AI would give the same answer twice to check it.

[LiberalArkie]

6. From the Bing client

[highplainsdem]

7. Did you check every detail of the answer Bing's chatbot gave you with a source widely considered reliable?

[LiberalArkie]

11. Most was from Wikipedia, CNN, BBC, French news.

Nothing reliable. I guess. I think the AI's are unreliable when you ask it for assumptions. Otherwise it is just a large search engine.

From what I can tell is that the questions that people ask and the responses is how it learns. But making assumptions and giving advice, that (to me) is like a teenager asking his buddy for advice. More than likely not going to be that good.

[highplainsdem]

17. Did you follow the links to the sources cited to see if they agreed with the AI-generated text? Chatbots

are infamous for citations of articles from real papers, magazines, etc. that either don't exist or don't say what the chatbot claims they say.

Chatbots are NOT "just a large search engine" - though the AI companies would love you to believe they are - because they hallucinate, fabricate sources and fabricate quotes.

I've been trying to explain this to DUers so they understand why chatbots can never be trusted. One of those threads, from November of 2024:

https://upload.democraticunderground.com/100219775018

[Drum]

5. Let the scolding commence...

[jmbar2]

8. There's an AI app for that

https://character.ai/character/xqVrrJir/wildly-entitled-karen

[highplainsdem]

9. Karens are conservative. And conservatives like AI slop. I'm a liberal who doesn't think it's a good idea

for liberals to use AI tools trained illegally on data sets of stolen intellectual property, owned and controlled by AI companies supporting Trump, that generate results that can never be trusted without careful checking because they can hallucinate at any time, and the accuracy of the entire result can never be guaranteed from accuracy of part of the result.

[jmbar2]

10. Are you sure that all Karens are conservative?

Are you taking the word of AI Karen on that, without fact-checking reliable sources?

[LiberalArkie]

12. Someone asked Claude about which party

[jmbar2]

13. Well, this gets curiouser and curiouser...

[LiberalArkie]

15. Yea, it surprised the crap out of me and the guy.. He has a lot of videos comparing each AI with the same prompt

They are worth watching.

https://www.youtube.com/@FatherPhi

[LiberalArkie]

16. The AI's at present are really stupid with assumptions and making decisions.

I think this is why the owners of Claude limited to what the DOW could do with it.. They are good at research but that is really it..

[jmbar2]

18. Will check it out

Love posts like this

[WhiskeyGrinder]

14. "deep dive"

[highplainsdem]

20. Definition of "deep dive" from Merriam-Webster:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/deep%20dive

an exhaustive investigation, study, or analysis of a question or topic

Asking AI is the opposite of that.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

21. exactly

[LiberalArkie]

23. At 78, I tend to let some one(thing) else to dive.. Although as a preteen my first book was Websters College dictionary

and later as a teen I curled up with the Encyclopedia Britannica. But not so much any more.

[highplainsdem]

24. Then let others who will do a real deep dive post deep dives to DU. You could have asked DUers to answer

that question, if you wanted an answer here.

I don't doubt that you're intelligent. I don't doubt that you could do a deep dive into that question if you wanted to.

But I doubt that it's a good idea to count on chatbots for information.

I don't doubt that posting AI results normalizes it and encourages others to use AI. And because the tech is both fundamentally unreliable and fundamentally unethical, I think it's a very bad idea to normalize it and treat it as harmless.

And using it does dumb users down. Which is also a bad idea if you hope to avoid cognitive decline. As we all do. It's better for your brain to look things up and write your own reply than to have a chatbot do it for you.

[LiberalArkie]

25. Good point. I think I relied too much on the encyclopedias to much as a child as that just gave me the information that

they wanted to give me and not everything. But that was in the 50's and 60's. Pre internet, pre women's rights, pre liberal thought patterns.

I learned how to search for information from the libraries and books. But even those have a slant.

Most people don't even know how to do a search. How to type in a question in the search bar of a browser. Even when they do, they only get data from one source that the browser search engine wanted supply.

So far I have found that Claude does seem to do more than just one source in its searching.

[jmbar2]

27. I am sorry to see your post getting hijacked

The growing vigilante action here on DU by a handful of busybodies is gonna destroy it. It really disturbs me at how fast it has taken over.

I didn't expect a doctoral treatise when I read your post. You brought up an interesting bit of history relevant to current news. That was a good contribution whether it passed the purity tests or not.

[LiberalArkie]

28. This tends to happen whenever people are discussing anything. The only way to have a nice peaceful discussion

system is for everyone to be in total agreement. It use to work so very good for the right until the Epstein thing happened.

[Jacson6]

19. I remember a Soldier Army truck driver tried to steal some of the gold on his truck. The MP's caught him

and he got 3 yrs in Leavenworth prison.

[JCMach1]

22. The grift was deep during the Iraq War

For example, a student of mine (his family) owned a civil engineering company in Iraq and has bid to repair a major bridge for a reasonable amount.

US authorities rejected their bid for a US company with no regional experience to demolish the old bridge and build a new one for expotentially more.

[Norrrm]

26. Oddball hauled it away in his tank.