America: land of the free, land of the brave, land of opportunity. And, more recently, land of mass domestic surveillance, land of making life-altering mass-murdering choices with AI, something so fundamentally inhumane that thousands of books have been published to warn of its consequences. Not long ago, the Department of War attempted to make a new contract with Anthropic, a company that creates AI models (most notably Claude). They have worked with the government before, stating that the company only wants to protect the country from outward harm. However, any past contract was broken when the Department of War pushed for a new one, except with a distinct lack of two agreements made in the previous contract. These agreements were that the AI was not to be used for the domestic surveillance of US citizens, as well as that AI would not be allowed to kill without human input. When presenting the new agreement, the Department of War refused to keep the clauses in, even going as far to threaten Anthropic with being blacklisted if they didn’t agree to terminate them. When Anthropic still declined to comply, they were blacklisted as previously promised, leaving a six-month period for the Department of War and the rest of the US government to replace all traces of the company from their operations. This begs the question, is the usage of AI for domestic surveillance and kill orders ethical, or even tolerable?
Privacy is a basic human right, yet it’s still seen as a privilege to have. Even so, there is no excuse for stealing personal details of a normal citizen’s life and using them for harm. To do so would be a violation of the constitution, a basic part of the democracy we have fought, bled, and died for. Anthropic simply wants to protect that right, yet Peter Hegseth, our Defense Secretary, said, “Anthropic’s stance is fundamentally incompatible with American principles.” Those ‘American principles’ Hegseth speaks of aren’t stealing privacy for personal gain. In reality, the stance the government has chosen and that Hegseth has promoted defies everything America stands for and is trying to make the country something far from what Anthropic is trying to protect – a free land for all, without corruption or bias. It may not seem possible to have a perfect country, but the direction we’re heading only puts us farther from that goal.
AI stands for artificial intelligence. It gains all knowledge from the humans who made it, simply doing what they would in any given situation. Or that would be the case if it weren’t for the fact that AI cannot feel. AI isn’t a sentient being; it cannot love or create with passion; it cannot understand how it feels to experience heartbreak or to go on a first date; it cannot cry when a loved one dies, nor can it hate strong enough to kill. Everything it knows is a copy of someone who can feel those things, yet it isn’t the same. That being said, AI should not be given a gun and be told it can shoot whenever it so pleases. It can comprehend that the death of a person can hurt another, but it doesn’t understand, it doesn’t feel. AI has no reason to comply with what it is told other than the fact of it being an order, a command the model is never supposed to disobey. It doesn’t care for the why, only the way to get to its objective. To give something with that much apathy the means for total annihilation isn’t smart – its madness presented as progress.
America truly was the land of the free, of the brave, of opportunity. Yet with every passing year those titles seem to become less and less true, to the point of absolution. In the case of Anthropic against the American government, that statement only seems to gain traction, bringing us where we are today.
