The US military wants to use its state-of-the-art AI tools to supercharge surveillance against Americans, making it easier than ever to monitor our movements, our search history, and our private associations. That\u2019s one of the major takeaways from a dramatic dispute between the Department of Defense and some of the leading AI companies in America. What this clash highlights most of all, however, is just how easily AI surveillance systems can be turned against the people in this country, and the urgent need for Congress to intervene.<\/p>\n
Last week, the Pentagon and Donald Trump announced that the government would cease using Anthropic\u2019s AI products<\/a>, asserting that the safety guardrails proposed by the company \u2013 no mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons \u2013 were unacceptable. The Trump administration went even further, claiming that these positions render Anthropic a \u201csupply chain risk<\/a>\u201d, and prohibited anyone doing business with the US military from conducting commercial activity with Anthropic in their military work.<\/p>\n But this is no ordinary contract dispute. This is a fight over the future of American privacy, and it will ultimately affect all of us.<\/p>\n At the heart of the dispute is the government\u2019s assertion that it should be able to use AI for any \u201clawful\u201d purpose. The problem is that the law is running decades behind the technology. The law doesn\u2019t account for a world where cellphones are tracking devices; our internet browsing is as revelatory as our personal diary; our data can be bought on the open market; and where AI would let the government seamlessly integrate this data it buys into the most comprehensive and largest set of domestic dossiers ever created.<\/p>\n Compounding this problem, as we saw with some of the worst surveillance abuses after September 11, the executive branch often secretly decides what is \u201clawful\u201d. Without clear and specific rules from Congress, the Trump administration<\/a> could rubberstamp a domestic spying program and deem it lawful because they said so. Given what we already know about the government\u2019s quenchless thirst for our data\u2013and how willing it has already been to sidestep our fourth amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures \u2013 this prospect is chilling to say the least.<\/p>\n The defense department and other federal agencies already take the position that they can \u201clawfully\u201d purchase Americans\u2019 private data \u2013 including location history and web-browsing records \u2013 and search that data without a court order. Although bipartisan coalitions in Congress have long criticized these warrantless searches, they\u2019ve so far failed to end them.<\/p>\n But the problem is poised to become far worse with AI. According to New York Times reporting<\/a> on the contract negotiations, the Pentagon wanted to apply AI to \u201cthe collection and analysis of unclassified, commercial bulk data on Americans, such as geolocation and web browsing data\u201d. Not only does the reporting confirm that the government is, in fact, collecting Americans\u2019 private data in bulk, but it shows that the Pentagon wants to deploy the world\u2019s most powerful tools to exploit this immense and controversial pool of data.<\/p>\n double quotation markThese tools promise to combine data from disparate sources, find patterns, and distill the results into a detailed picture of someone\u2019s movements, political views or associations<\/p>\n AI tools could allow the government, at the touch of a button, to extract information and inferences about a person that previously might have taken an agent or analyst days or weeks to develop. These tools promise to combine data from disparate sources, find patterns, and distill the results into a detailed picture of someone\u2019s movements, political views or associations. As just one example: the government may purchase a large dataset containing the movements of thousands of cellphones, but often those trails of digital data don\u2019t have names assigned to them, requiring additional analysis. AI can conduct that kind of analysis faster than any human, while integrating other data streams for an even more comprehensive picture of a person\u2019s life. And it can do this work at scale. That\u2019s especially alarming when one considers the Trump administration\u2019s race to access voting data, health records, and tax information.<\/p>\n Anthropic\u2019s fight might be with the Pentagon, but other government agencies purchase commercial data in bulk too. As the ACLU\u2019s Freedom of Information Act work has confirmed<\/a>, ICE has repeatedly bought cellphone location data and information from license plate databases to go after immigrant communities. And over the past few months, federal agents have also been collecting license plate data<\/a> and faceprints<\/a> from some of the people protesting and documenting their activities in public. Against this backdrop, there is every reason to be concerned about the powers that these agencies are amassing via AI.<\/p>\n As in other contexts, AI tools remove human friction from the work of surveillance, magnifying the dangers of digital spying by making it cheaper, faster and more detailed. If Congress fails to step in, the application of AI to \u201clawfully\u201d acquired data could quickly lead to a dystopian government database filled with the most telling details about all of us. The consequences of an AI-powered mass domestic database would be devastating: large-scale invasions of privacy, an extreme chill on the freedoms of speech and association, and the targeting of vulnerable or unpopular populations for further scrutiny or worse.<\/p>\n For society as a whole, these effects are corrosive. And as we know firsthand from our clients at the ACLU, government surveillance can feed into discriminatory profiling and watchlists. It can result in unwarranted investigations and prosecutions. And it leaves people looking over their shoulders for decades.<\/p>\n On Monday night, OpenAI \u2013 which had announced an agreement with the Pentagon<\/a> after Anthropic\u2019s fell through \u2013 said it was amending its deal<\/a> to add language protecting the civil liberties of US citizens and permanent residents. While this is a welcome development, the new language is riddled with loopholes. And it underscores a bigger problem: our rights shouldn\u2019t rise or fall with the whims of one CEO. Whether government agencies should be buying Americans\u2019 private data, and whether they should be applying AI tools to analyze that data, are immensely consequential questions. The answers to these questions shouldn\u2019t depend on contracts that can change at any time (and in secret); nor should they depend on the individual viewpoints or market motives of tech executives. People in the United States deserve a real and lasting legislative solution to protect their privacy. Congress must step in.<\/p>\n Congress can start by passing the bipartisan Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, a commonsense reform bill that bans the government from buying data that it would otherwise need a warrant to obtain. Congress must also impose basic guardrails on the government\u2019s use of novel AI tools: safeguards that protect against warrantless invasions of our privacy and prohibit uses that threaten our ability to speak out and associate freely online and off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The US military wants to use its state-of-the-art AI tools to supercharge surveillance against Americans, making it easier…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":465946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-465945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/465946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}