🤖“Killer Robots” Edition

The AI industry’s latest ethical showdown arrived last Friday night when the Pentagon punished one company for having principles and rewarded another for being, well, morally flexible.

Anthropic had just been blacklisted by the U.S. government after insisting on two firm rules for military AI: no mass surveillance of Americans and no autonomous weapons deciding who lives or dies. The Pentagon responded the way large bureaucracies traditionally respond to moral objections: by labeling them a “supply-chain risk,” a designation normally reserved for suspicious foreign adversaries, not Silicon Valley startups with ethics concerns.

Enter OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who promptly announced that his company had managed to preserve those exact same ethical red lines in its own Pentagon contract. This raised an obvious question across the tech world: if the Pentagon refused those conditions five minutes ago, how did they suddenly agree now?

The answer, critics say, is that they didn’t. OpenAI simply agreed that the military could use its technology for “any lawful use,” a phrase that historically has included things like mass surveillance programs that were also, technically, lawful.

In other words, Anthropic drew a line in the sand and got run over by a tank. OpenAI drew the same line, but in disappearing ink.

Altman nonetheless celebrated the agreement as proof that the company had successfully balanced ethics and national security, while the Pentagon celebrated it as proof that Silicon Valley eventually remembers who signs the checks.

According to critics, the agreement’s key safeguard is that phrase “any lawful use,” which means the U.S. military can use OpenAI’s technology for anything the government decides is legal: an arrangement that historically has included such beloved programs as mass data collection, bulk phone surveillance, and whatever else the intelligence community can fit inside a legal memo.

Altman insists this still honors OpenAI’s principles, because the company prohibits illegal surveillance. Skeptics note that almost every controversial surveillance program of the last 30 years was also described as legal at the time.

The compromise also technically bans autonomous AI weapons, except in situations where the law already requires human oversight, which is roughly equivalent to banning bank robbery where bank robbery is already illegal.

OpenAI further promised technical safeguards like “classifiers” to make sure the AI isn’t misused. Experts responded that these tools can detect certain things, but not whether a system is quietly helping build a massive surveillance database or guiding the early stages of a weapons kill chain.

The Pentagon, for its part, seemed pleased with the arrangement, reminding tech companies that America’s military strategy will be determined by the Commander-in-Chief, not by Silicon Valley executives who suddenly discovered ethics the moment someone mentioned autonomous killer drones.

David Horsey - Tribune Content Agency

Dennis Goris

Steve Breen - Creators

Matt Davies - Andrews McMeel

Drew Sheneman - Substack and Tribune Content Agency

Nick Anderson - Substack and Tribune Content Agency

Bill Bramhall - Tribune Content Agency

Pedro Molina - Tinyview and Tribune Content Agency

Joel Pett - Tribune Content Agency

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