High-stakes fight between Hegseth and Anthropic

The Atlantic: Hegseth’s antagonism spurred speculation about the Pentagon’s plans—perhaps the military would refuse Anthropic’s restrictions only if it planned to establish an American Stasi manned by AI agents or had a fleet of killer-autonomous-drone swarms ready to launch, maybe even imminently over Iran. “This is what many of us have been warning about for years and is now coming true, which is AI-powered surveillance that could be beyond Orwellian,” Brendan Steinhauser, a former Republican operative in Texas who now leads the safety-oriented nonprofit Alliance for Secure AI, told me. “This could lead to us losing control of autonomous weapons.” Steinhauser argues that Hegseth should back down rather than provoke a civil-liberties nightmare…