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The one question everyone should be asking after OpenAI’s deal with the Pentagon

The US said we can’t afford to let a surveillance state like China win the AI race. Well...

American AI companies love to say that the US must win the AI arms race, or China will.

Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta have all invoked the threat of a Chinese victory to justify speeding ahead on AI development, seemingly no matter what. The argument is simple: Whoever pulls ahead in building the most powerful AI could be the global superpower for a long, long time. China’s authoritarian government suppresses dissent, surveils its citizens, and answers to no one. We cannot let that model win.

And to be clear — we shouldn’t. The Chinese Communist Party’s human rights abuses are real and horrific, and AI technologies like facial recognition have made them worse. We should be scared of a scenario where that becomes the norm.

But what if authoritarian rule that uses tech to surveil people in alarming ways is already becoming the norm in the US? If America is shape-shifting into the bogeyman it critiques, what happens to the case for racing ahead on AI?

This is the question everyone should be asking now that the Pentagon has blacklisted Anthropic — and embraced its rival, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, which was more willing to accede to its demands. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent. Future Perfect is funded in part by the BEMC Foundation, whose major funder was also an early investor in Anthropic. They do not have any editorial input into our content.)

The US Department of Defense is already using AI powered by private companies for everything from logistics to intelligence analysis. That has included a $200 million contract with Anthropic, which makes the chatbot Claude. But after the US used Claude in its January raid in Venezuela, a dispute erupted between Anthropic and the Pentagon.

The two redlines Anthropic insisted on in its contract with the Defense Department — that its AI shouldn’t be used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons — represent such fundamental rights that they should have been uncontroversial. And yet the Pentagon threatened that it would either force Anthropic to submit to full and unfettered use of its tech, or else name Anthropic a supply chain risk, which would mean that any external company that also works with the US military would have to swear off using Anthropic’s AI for related work.

When Anthropic didn’t back down on its requirements, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth followed through on the latter threat — an unprecedented move, given that the designation has previously been reserved for foreign adversaries like China’s Huawei, not American companies.

As a journalist who’s spent years reporting on China’s use of AI to surveil and repress Uyghur Muslims, learning of the Pentagon’s threats reminded me of nothing so much as China’s own policy of “military-civil fusion.” That policy involves compelling private tech companies to make their innovations available to the military, whether they want to or not. Either wittingly or unwittingly, Hegseth seemed to be borrowing directly from Beijing’s playbook.

“The Pentagon’s threats against Anthropic copy the worst aspects of China’s military-civil fusion strategy,” Jeffrey Ding, who teaches political science at George Washington University and specializes in China’s AI ecosystem, told me. “China’s actions to force high-tech private companies into military obligations may lead to short-term technology transfer, but it undermines the trust necessary for long-term partnerships between the commercial and defense sectors.”

To be clear, America is not the same as China. After all, Anthropic was able to freely voice its opposition to the Pentagon’s demands, and the company says it’ll sue the US government over the blacklisting, which would be unthinkable for a Chinese firm in the........

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