OpenAI's Pentagon deal raises new questions about AI and surveillance | Fortune

"One of the key points of contention was over domestic mass surveillance. Experts have long warned that advanced AI is capable of taking scattered, individually innocuous data-like a person's location, finances, search history-and assembling it into a comprehensive picture of any person's life, automatically and at scale."

"Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that this kind of AI-driven mass surveillance presents serious and novel risks to people's "fundamental liberties" and "the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI.""

"Part of the dispute hinges on the murky legality of large-scale analysis of Americans' data that is lawful under current U.S. statutes, even if it feels indistinguishable from mass surveillance. "Right now, under U.S. law, it's lawful for government authorities to buy up commercially available information from data brokers and other third parties," Samir Jain, the vice president of Policy at the Center for Democracy & Technology, said."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced a Pentagon agreement hours after publicly backing Anthropic's resistance to military demands. The US government had designated Anthropic a supply chain risk, prompting OpenAI's deal despite criticism from AI researchers and policy experts. Key contentions centered on domestic mass surveillance, as advanced AI can assemble scattered personal data into comprehensive life profiles automatically at scale. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned this presents novel risks to fundamental liberties, with law lagging behind AI capabilities. OpenAI claimed its Pentagon agreement prohibits mass domestic surveillance and direct autonomous weapons systems, matching Anthropic's demands. However, legal experts identified potential gaps: current US law permits government purchase of commercially available data from brokers, creating ambiguity between lawful data analysis and mass surveillance.

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