Congress must prevent AI surveillance. The Anthropic feud proves it | Ashley Gorski and Patrick Toomey

"The Pentagon and Donald Trump announced that the government would cease using Anthropic's AI products, asserting that the safety guardrails proposed by the company—no mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons—were unacceptable. The Trump administration went even further, claiming that these positions render Anthropic a supply chain risk, and prohibited anyone doing business with the US military from conducting commercial activity with Anthropic in their military work."

"At the heart of the dispute is the government's assertion that it should be able to use AI for any lawful purpose. The problem is that the law is running decades behind the technology. The law doesn't 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."

"Compounding this problem, as we saw with some of the worst surveillance abuses after September 11, the executive branch often secretly decides what is lawful. Without clear and specific rules from Congress, the Trump administration could rubberstamp a domestic spying program and deem it lawful because the law provides no meaningful constraints."

The Department of Defense and Trump administration have ceased using Anthropic's AI products, citing the company's safety guardrails against mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons as unacceptable constraints. This dispute exposes a critical gap between rapidly advancing AI technology and outdated legal frameworks governing surveillance. Current law fails to address modern data collection capabilities, including cellphone tracking, internet browsing records, and commercially available personal data that AI systems could integrate into comprehensive domestic dossiers. The executive branch historically determines surveillance legality in secret, as demonstrated by post-9/11 abuses. Without specific congressional intervention and clear legal restrictions, the government could deploy AI-powered domestic surveillance programs deemed lawful through executive interpretation alone.

Read at www.theguardian.com