Let’s Be Evil: Anthropic, OpenAI and the Department of War
By: Alex Hanna, Decca Muldowney and Emily M. Bender
Last week, Donald Trump directed federal agencies to immediately cease using tech from Anthropic after the company refused to give the US military unrestricted access to its “AI” tools. The company cited concerns about mass surveillance of Americans and autonomous weapon development. In response, Department of War head Pete Hegseth dubbed Anthropic a “supply chain risk”. OpenAI then stepped in to fill the void, announcing it would do a deal with the Pentagon.
Was this an example of an AI company finally standing up to the Trump regime and doing the “right thing” when it comes to concerns about the lethal entanglement between the military and “AI”? Sadly, no.
The enemy of my enemy is not my friend. We shouldn’t be glorifying Anthropic. The company is aligned with Effective Altruists (EAs), which Timnit Gebru has identified as “a dangerous cult rooted in eugenics”. They are obsessed with things like giving robots human rights, “AI model welfare”, and the end of the world, instead of who is actually being harmed by “AI” in the present. (For more on this check out The TESCREAL Bundle.)
In a recent episode of Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, we were lucky enough to have the award-winning journalist and activist Naomi Klein on the podcast to help us unpack the lethal love affair between the military and Big Tech. She argued that we should see the relationship between the two as a “bailout” of the AI industry’s unworkable business model. Companies are hoping they will be rescued with government contracts.
![[video description] Three people are speaking with each other on a horizontally split screen. At the start, they are looking at an online article, which is shown on screen. One, Alex, is a brown trans woman with short curly black hair, wearing a white sweater, and in a room with purple and pink flowers hanging down from the ceiling. The second, Naomi Klein, is a white cis woman with brown hair, wearing a black jacket and glasses, with wooden bookshelves behind her in a brightly lit room. Emily is a white cis woman with curly brown hair, wearing glasses and a blue shirt and scarf, in a room with a floral wallpaper.](https://assets.buttondown.email/images/55a71807-415e-448b-8b68-40dfd420ffdc.jpg?w=960&fit=max)
“The whole point of the Trump administration in so many ways is best understood as a merger between Big Tech and Washington. And this is their next bubble, and they've kind of run out of consumer products,” Naomi said on the podcast. “Consumers are unreliable, government contracts are where it's at.”
The stakes are immense. Naomi pointed out that embedding “AI” into battlefield decisions can have disastrous consequences, something we’ve already seen play out during Israel’s war on Gaza. And whether or not any “AI” systems were involved in targeting the girl’s elementary school where the US murdered 150 people, mostly schoolkids, we see the rotten fruit of that merger: “AI” as an ideology says that we can and should offload decision-making to machines, that speed and scale are always good, that targets are just data, and systems getting it wrong is simply to be expected.
Meanwhile, Axios and the Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic’s Claude chatbot was still used in targeting the recent US attack on Iran and on Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in January. While any company resisting the Trump administration is noteworthy, Anthropic is no hero here.
At Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 we’ve explored the large-scale hype around “AI” and warfare, as well as its very real dangers:
Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 Episode 72: How the War Department Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI (with Naomi Klein). AI boosters and the US military are engaged in a lethal love affair. Award-winning journalist Naomi Klein joins Emily and Alex to discuss how glitchy technology supports global imperialism — and vice versa. Plus, we explore which Dr. Strangelove characters are currently running the US war machine. [Livestream, Podcast, Transcript]
Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 Episode 14: Henry Kissinger, Machines of War, and the Age of Military AI Hype. In which technology scholar Dr. Lucy Suchman joins Alex and Emily to discuss the abundant hype about the capacity of large language models for warmaking. [Livestream, Podcast, Transcript]
Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 Episode 27: Asimov's Laws vs. 'AI' Death-Making. Science fiction authors and all-around tech thinkers Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders join Alex and Emily to discuss Issaac Asimov’s oft-misunderstood “laws of robotics”, and how global and US military institutions are declaring interest in 'ethical' frameworks for autonomous weaponry. [Livestream, Podcast, Transcript]
Chapter 6 of The AI Con: I’m Sorry, Dave, I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That: AI Doomers, AI Boosters, and Why None of That Makes Sense. Emily and Alex discuss AI Doomerism and Boosterism and how both serve to “obscure, rather than illuminate, what’s at stake when it comes to the current AI boom.” They also dig into “AI safety”, Effective Altruism and the TESCREAL ideologies.
