The Authoritarian AI Crisis Has Arrived↗
This might low-key be one of the most consequential stories of the year. Not only because of the stakes, but because of how it has so effectively pushed Anthropic to the front page of the news day in and day out. They are taking the moral high ground, have the superior product, and are on a truly monumental run as a company. Good for them.
Highlights
In their cowardly background statements to reporters, Pentagon flacks haven’t even bothered to pretend Hegseth’s ultimatum is a logical one. The point is to get Anthropic — currently the only AI contractor whose models are operating on classified networks — to do what every other major tech company has done during Trump 2.0, and submit to the will of the president and his lieutenants.
The problem is that there are essentially no federal laws governing military AI. No statute addresses autonomous weapons or how they might be deployed. And no regulation sets standards for AI-assisted surveillance. When nothing has been legislated, “all lawful use” becomes permission to do almost anything. It’s no wonder that in his recent essay about the downside risk of powerful AI, Amodei identified surveillance and autonomous killing as major risks of an authoritarian government getting its hands on frontier models.
Anthropic’s concerns about surveillance in particular are far from speculative. The Trump administration is already using AI for exactly the kind of domestic monitoring that Anthropic says its tools shouldn’t be part of.
And so when Anthropic says it doesn’t want to build software that would enable that dystopia, it’s not enough for the Pentagon to assure us (anonymously!) that it will follow the law. Other parts of the same government are already actively doing the thing Amodei has been warning about in his blog posts. The dystopia Anthropic is seeking to prevent is already materializing.
to Hegseth’s Pentagon, the outrage is that Anthropic would draw any red lines at all. This Trump administration speaks only in the brittle language of dominance and submission. It negotiates only by threat. Any resistance, no matter how principled, must be crushed.
“Woke” now does for Sacks and co. the same work here that “bias” and “censorship” did in Trump 1.0. It transforms substantive questions — should AI spy on all your conversations, or operate weapons without human oversight? — into culture-war grievances, or thought-terminating clichés.
On one hand, you never want to count on Congress to meet the moment when it comes to tech regulation. On the other hand, few issues poll better than placing limits on surveillance and autonomous weapons. If ever there were a time for civil liberties-minded Republicans to act, it is now.