#ai + #politics

...these systems sit squarely in the center of a recent high-stakes battle between the US government and AI startup Anthropic. Anthropic is seeking to preserve two “red lines”: bans on domestic mass surveillance and on weapons that can identify, track, and kill targets with zero human involvement. Since the start of the year, it’s emerged as the only military AI contractor to place meaningful limits on what experts call one of the final frontiers of AI warfare.

At the center of the debates is DOD Directive 3000.09, one of the only policies governing the use of lethal autonomous weapons. Originally written in 2012, it defines such a system as one that, “once activated, can select and engage targets without further intervention by an operator.” And it decrees that both fully autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons be designed to allow humans to “exercise appropriate levels” of judgment over the use of force.

The directive set up the “first policy on the use of autonomy in warfare,” said Hamza Chaudhry, who leads AI and national security at the Future of Life Institute.

Depending on how you interpret the definition, however, certain missile defense programs may have crossed that line decades ago. Take the Phalanx CIWS, for instance. It’s an automated weapon system resembling a very large gun, built to defend naval vessels from incoming missile attacks. That type of system wouldn’t work if there were a human in the loop, since it has to respond in milliseconds.

The difference, some experts say, is that these systems operate solely in a defense-only, fixed environment. They’re engaging, this interpretation goes, but not deciding — just reacting to an incoming threat. “The ‘and’ is doing a lot of work inside of that statute — we have systems that can decide and systems that can engage but you can’t have a system that does both,” Reddie said.

They're also "killing" missiles not humans.

Google employees argued their company should take a stand — and it did, choosing not to renew its contract amid the controversy in mid-2018. But Amazon and Microsoft quickly swooped in to pick up tens of millions of dollars in contracts for the same work. Palantir soon took over, and Project Maven became the Maven Smart System (MSS), which not only allows for object detection and tracking but also analyzing surveillance data on a large scale.

The sheer volume of targets could make any meaningful human supervision difficult, said Shoker. “What we know about MSS is that it reduces the number of human beings in the targeting cycle — and that’s actually by design.”

While Anthropic might have been all right reducing human intervention, it’s pushed back against setting it to zero. As Google found with Project Maven, though, competitors are more than willing to fill the gap.

OpenAI quickly signed onto the terms Anthropic had spurned. And in the months after snubbing Anthropic, the Department of Defense signed deals with eight companies to deploy their AI on classified networks: Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Nvidia, OpenAI, Reflection, Oracle, and SpaceX.

Silicon Valley executives are aggressively pushing back against employee organizing and speaking out, including by using AI to identify leakers. And many tech workers already fear for their jobs in an era when AI is set to replace entry-level roles at their own firms.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has held firm on mass surveillance for Americans, but he’s demonstrated no problem with — and in fact expressed his support for — such surveillance for everyone else.

Anthropic’s “very narrow” red lines “do not go far enough to protect human rights or to comply with international law,” said Tech Justice Law’s Batt. “Anthropic specifically talks about mass domestic surveillance of US persons as posing grave civil liberties concerns, but the same civil liberties concerns apply with equal force to non-US persons,” she added.

In a blog post, he said that “fully autonomous weapons (those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets) may prove critical for our national defense.” Amodei even said he was happy to “work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems” and speed up the timeline for the company’s help in deploying them.

It does, kinda, matter that Hegseth turned a simple contract dispute into an attempted corporate death sentence, weaponizing a supply-chain security designation that was clearly designed for tech the US government fears could be infiltrated by hostile foreign nations.

Yet, under Hegseth’s order, Chinese AI models would technically be more welcome in America’s military supply chain than Anthropic’s. The “supply chain risk” designation is now being used to punish a domestic company for having safety guidelines. DeepSeek, with its direct ties to the Chinese government, faces fewer restrictions than a San Francisco company that committed the cardinal sin of asking for human oversight on killing decisions.

One source familiar with the Pentagon’s negotiations with AI companies confirmed that OpenAI’s deal is much softer than the one Anthropic was pushing for, thanks largely to three words: “any lawful use.” In negotiations, the person said, the Pentagon wouldn’t back down on its desire to collect and analyze bulk data on Americans. If you look line-by-line at the OpenAI terms, the source said, every aspect of it boils down to: If it’s technically legal, then the US military can use OpenAI’s technology to carry it out. And over the past decades, the US government has stretched the definition of “technically legal” to cover sweeping mass surveillance programs — and more.

In the years after 9/11, US intelligence agencies ramped up a surveillance system that they determined fell within the legal limits OpenAI cites, including multiple mass domestic spying operations (along with apparently highly invasive international ones). In 2013, National Security Agency intelligence contractor Edward Snowden revealed the extent of some of these programs, such as reportedly collecting telephone records of Verizon customers on an “ongoing, daily” basis, and gathering bulk data on individuals from tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple via a secretive program called PRISM. Despite promises of reform from intelligence agencies and attempts at legal changes, few significant limits to these powers were enacted. Mike Masnick, founder of Techdirt, said online that OpenAI’s deal “absolutely does allow for domestic surveillance. EO 12333 is how the NSA hides its domestic surveillance by capturing communications by tapping into lines outside the US even if it contains info from/on US persons.”

The danger here isn’t just about one contract; it’s about the precedent. If the Pentagon successfully bullies Anthropic into submission or replaces it with a more “flexible” competitor, we are effectively witnessing the birth of an intentionally unethical AI.

The Death of Human Agency When AI is integrated into weaponry for “all lawful purposes” without restrictions on autonomy, we invite the Responsibility Gap. If an AI-driven drone swarm misidentifies a target, who is at fault? By removing the “human-in-the-loop” requirement, the military is seeking a weapon that offers the ultimate prize of war: lethality without accountability. Surveillance as a Service Existing U.S. laws were written for wiretaps, not for generative AI that can ingest millions of data points to build predictive profiles. Under an “all lawful purposes” mandate, an LLM could be turned into a digital Panopticon. Anthropic has warned that current laws have not caught up to what AI can do in terms of analyzing open-source intelligence on citizens. The Moral Race to the Bottom If the Pentagon blacklists Anthropic, it sends a clear message to competitors: Safety is a liability. To win government billions, firms will be incentivized to strip away safety layers. Reports already suggest OpenAI, Google, and xAI have shown more “flexibility” regarding the Pentagon’s demands.

The Pentagon’s “supply chain threat” maneuver is a scorched-earth tactic designed to force Silicon Valley to choose between its values and its bottom line.

If Anthropic stands firm, it may lose $200 million in revenue and a seat at the defense table. But if they cave, they may well be providing the operating system for the very “Terminator” future they were founded to prevent. In the world of 2026, the most dangerous threat to the supply chain might just be an AI that has been ordered to stop caring about ethics.