How to Make Sure AI Doesn't Spy on Us or Kill Innocent People |
Artificial Intelligence
How to Make Sure AI Doesn't Spy on Us or Kill Innocent People
If we want powerful AI systems to respect liberty, now is the time to train them to be more libertarian.
Zach Weissmueller | 5.26.2026 12:05 PM
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One of America's top AI companies—Anthropic—refused to sign off on a contract unless the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) promised not to use its technology to power autonomous killer robots or carry out domestic mass surveillance. So, the Pentagon accused it of trying to undermine U.S. sovereignty by dictating how we fight our wars.
Defense Undersecretary Emil Michael put it plainly in a March 2026 interview on CNBC's Squawk Box: "We realized we are dependent on this one provider who wants to insert their policy preferences in the middle of an operation."
Anthropic sued the Pentagon for labeling it a "supply chain threat," a designation that would have forced a slew of major companies (Amazon, Google, and Nvidia among them) to cut off their business ties. This would have been disastrous for one of America's leading AI companies.
The issue is being worked out in court and closed-door negotiations, but whatever happens, we can expect more high-stakes battles between the U.S. government and Silicon Valley over who controls a technology that is transforming not just warfare but the entire global economy.
"I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote in a 2026 essay. "We are so close to these models reaching the level of human intelligence, and yet there doesn't seem to be a wider recognition in society of what's about to happen."
Amodei calls for "sensible A.I. regulation" in a 2025 New York Times op-ed. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) is calling for something more drastic.
"We are announcing legislation to impose a moratorium on the construction of new AI data centers until strong national safeguards are in place," Sanders said at a 2026 press conference.
Sanders is spearheading a movement to halt American AI development until we figure out what the hell is going on.
"What was once seen as science fiction could soon become a reality," he said in video posted on social media, "and that is that super intelligent AI could become smarter than human beings, could become independent of human control, and could pose an existential threat to the entire human race."
But declaring a moratorium would give our geopolitical rivals a dangerous advantage and would be disastrous for the human race.
AI's potential for mass surveillance and autonomous warfare is scary, but just because a technology has a dark side doesn't mean it should be stopped. A 19th-century cartoon inveighing against electricity depicted the corpse of a Western Union lineman "falling into the tangle of wire…and smoldering for the better part of an hour" as a crowd looked on in horror. Thank god we didn't enact a moratorium on this "unrestrained demon" back in 1889.
But Anthropic was right to raise red flags about how the government could use AI to spy on its citizens or kill innocent people.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and the computer privacy activists known as "cypherpunks" who preceded him have been sounding the alarm for decades about the need to design technology that forces government restraint.
"You design against the worst possible case to avoid the inevitable," Snowden said at TOKEN2049 Singapore in 2024.
Privacy activists "cannot trust the government to implement the policies that it says it's implementing," as Julian Assange explained in a roundtable with fellow cypherpunks in 2012, "and so we must provide the underlying tools—cryptographic tools—that we control as a sort of use of force."
We'll need a similar technological "use of force" to keep malicious actors from wielding AI to degrade our civil liberties. Slowing AI down with regulation, or handing control over it to the government, is dangerous and counterproductive. AI models must be programmed to behave ethically.
If we want a powerful AI to respect human liberty, its creators need to make it more libertarian. And if we want it to act humanely, they must encode it, at the deepest level, with pro-human values.
Snowden is worried about the implications of AI for civil liberties. Palantir's AI-powered tools allow the government to find patterns in the massive amounts of data it collects and target individual movements. It's what allowed the military to plan out the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro overseas and track undocumented immigrants in the homeland, but it could also easily be turned against the domestic population. Snowden says time is running out.
"This is not a bullet we're going to dodge," Snowden said at SuperAI Singapore in 2025. "It's already been fired. It's headed towards us. We have very little time to react."
Regulation simply isn't a realistic solution with a technology advancing this quickly. "It's not like, oh, ban AI, or there's a limit of this many flops in a data center—all the idiot stuff that we see in terms of AI regulation right now," Snowden continued at the same event. "More broadly [we must ask]: What do people do? What recourse do they have when they have been ruled against by some AI system?"
AI makes decisions based on patterns in massive data sets. As it becomes more sophisticated, those patterns become less recognizable to humans. It's called the "black box" problem. That's why Snowden argues that humans should always be empowered to override an AI system.
"You can't just have the black box where it goes, 'Should John Doe be accepted for XYZ?' And the person at the desk says, 'Well, the computer says no.' And there's no way to interrogate that," he says.
This black box problem is one reason Anthropic drew a red line around autonomous weapons. They "cannot be relied upon to exercise the critical judgment that our highly trained, professional troops exhibit every day," Amodei wrote in a public statement on the DOD dispute.
Videos from Ukraine of explosive drones stalking Russian soldiers show how terrifying being hunted down by a robot can be. Outsourcing the use of lethal force to an AI model that makes decisions for reasons we don't fully understand isn't acceptable.
But Anthropic didn't say autonomous weapons are off the table forever, only that its models aren't reliable yet and that "fully autonomous weapons…may prove critical for our national defense."
"The slaughter bots are coming," says Dean W. Ball, an AI........