As I wrote here yesterday, Anthropic’s showdown with The US Department of War may literally be life or death for all of us. If Pete Hegseth forces Dario Amodei to fold, not one but two monstrous precedents will be set.
The first is obvious, and terrible in itself. The second is subtle but no less important.
The first is that what Secretary Hegseth is demanding, backed by heavy threats, is that the US military have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic’s AI software, for applications such as military surveillance and autonomous weapons without humans in the loop. This could well extend to nuclear weapons.
Nothing that I have read convinces me that Secretary Hegseth has a nuanced understanding of the strengths and limits of current AI, or that he will show restraint in how he applies it. Rather he is trying to define his career in part around deploying AI as broadly and as quickly as possible.
The second is that Hegseth’s maneuver is an audacious power grabs that aims to circumvent Congress. By setting a deadline of 5:01 PM eastern tomorrow, Hegseth aims to cut everybody else – even Congress — out of the loop.
A reader of this newsletter, a tech writer who describes himself as a political independent just wrote to me, rightfully panicked:
Today the Pentagon will force Anthropic to change their corporate goal of responsible AI. This is not something to be decided in the marketplace by a bully with deep pockets; it must be decided in Congress. Senators and Congressmen must take a position and deliberate in public about whether it is OK to use AI for surveillance of Americans and to launch lethal strikes controlled by AI with no “human in the loop”. Please say something today, before Amodei has to surrender.
He is right.
Please call or write your Senators and Representatives right now.
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AI policy, especially of this magnitude, is something that American people should have a say in. Congress should deliberate. Mass surveillance and AI-fueled weapons, possibly nuclear, without humans in the loop are categorically not things that one individual, even one in the Cabinet, should be allowed to decide at a gunpoint.
But that is exactly where we are headed.