AI's mass surveillance problem

The Pentagon’s standoff with Anthropic highlights a mass surveillance reality: There are few laws limiting what the government can do with artificial intelligence. AI's evolving technology enables scenarios that may be widely unpopular, but fully legal. One of Anthropic's stated red lines was barring its AI system from mass domestic surveillance. "AI-driven mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote. "To the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, this is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI," he also wrote. The Pentagon, meanwhile, wanted the ability to use AI for essentially any purpose allowed by law. Letting the Pentagon deploy AI for anything that is legal would give it sweeping discretion, given that Congress has yet to establish clear guardrails. That's compounded by the lack of federal privacy protections or limits on what the government can do with commercially available data.