Trump Has Racked Up At Least 157 Extrajudicial Boat Strike Murders In The Last 6 Months

from the serial-killings dept

The boat strike program the Trump administration is engaged in isn’t actually supported by law. Even his own in-house counsel can’t seem to agree on what justification to use. Shortly after being threatened with a little congressional oversight, the Office of Legal Counsel shrugged together a legal memo that basically said that the less of a direct threat boats allegedly carrying drugs to the US posed to US national security, the more easily the people in the boats could be killed.

And it’s not like the strikes are discriminate. They’re based on hunches and the administration’s desire to eradicate any boat it thinks has departed from countries it wants to control, like Venezuela. On top of the lack of legal rationale for initial strikes, there’s evidence the Defense Department engages in double- or triple-tap attacks meant to kill the survivors of the original strike — something that’s extremely handy because it also kills potential litigants.

Those extra strikes are illegal under even the United State’s own rules of engagement. And yet they continue. These strikes may have fallen off the radar due to the deluge of unbelievably horrific shit this administration generates daily, but they’re still happening even if the focus has shifted elsewhere.

Fighting a war on drugs doesn’t actually mean you’re engaged in a literal war — you know, the sort of thing Congress used to get angry about if presidents decided they’d rather not deal with any resistance from the legislative branch when getting their war on. This country engages on “wars” on everything from literacy and hunger (but not this administration) to abstract concepts like “woke” and “transgender everywhere.”

That doesn’t mean the administration can drone strike entities still clinging to DEI initiative. Nor can it blow up shipments of cell phones designed for children’s hands just because it believes these “distractions” are leading to lower reading comprehension scores.

The same goes for the War on Drugs. While there’s value in intercepting shipments and arresting those involved, a military program that kills people just because they might be trafficking drugs (much of which appears to headed to other destinations than the United States) is not only illegal, it’s immoral.

Human rights organizations — including those recognized by international governing groups — are making this point as forcefully as possible.

Experts in international and U.S. domestic law told an inter-American human rights organization on Friday that the Pentagon’s campaign of blowing up boats it suspected of smuggling drugs in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean was illegal.

[…]

Ben Saul, the U.N. special rapporteur for protecting fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, accused the United States of “responding with lawless violence that flagrantly violates human rights, in its phony war on so-called narco-terrorism.”

“Drug trafficking is a crime, not war,” said Mr. Saul, a professor of international law. He also said a portrayal of the suspected drug traffickers as being responsible for “speculative drug overdoses” did not constitute a “permissible law enforcement action in personal self-defense or the defense of others.”

Perhaps you’re as cynical as I am. Maybe you see this and wonder what is even the point: some dude said some stuff to the United Nations, which doesn’t mean much now that the Trump administration has decided no other nation or international association of nations has the power to stop it from doing what it wants to do.

Sure, there’s limited utility in statements made to entities the US government is just going to ignore. But don’t let that bury the lede: the Trump administration is engaged in an unprecedented murder program predicated solely on its legally unsupported position that trafficking drugs (to anywhere!) is exactly identical to engaging in terrorist attacks against US citizens.

Here’s how this is adding up so far, according to the tally generated by the New York Times:

The U.S. military has blown up 45 small vessels, killing at least 157 people, in six months of strikes since September. 

This is an under-count. There’s no reason to believe the government has released information on every strike, especially since it delayed release of footage showing the military engaging in multiple strikes to murder survivors of its initial boat strike. We may never know the full body count of this extrajudicial killing program. But it’s harrowing to note (as the Times does in its report) that only two rescues of boat strike victims occurred during the last six months, even though the military is obligated — by US law and international law — to attempt to rescue survivors of military attacks it engages in.

The White House is War Crime Central. And now it’s adding to its rap sheet by bombing Iranian schools on top of killing people in international waters. The administration’s response, of course, refused to engage with the allegations made during this conference, choosing instead to claim (1) the Intra-American Human Rights Court (IAHCR) should mind its own business and (2) that it should look at some other cases that don’t involve the Trump administration’s casual human rights violations. You know, the usual stuff: “you’re not the boss of me” + whataboutism.

It’s the State Department pretending you can make a Venn diagram out of humanitarian aid mandates and international human rights laws:

The IACHR lacks the competence to review the matters at issue, which concern the interpretation and application of international humanitarian law, not human rights law, and should not be a pawn in a domestic litigation strategy of the ACLU or any other party.

A normal person would see these concepts as nearly completely overlapping. This administration is not normal. It’s a collective of inhumane people with an inordinate amount of power. And from what’s seen here, it’s clear the body count in international waters will only continue to rise.

Filed Under: boat strikes, defense department, extrajudicial killings, murder, pentagon, pete hegseth, trump administration, venezuela, war on drugs

The U.S. Built A Blueprint To Avoid Civilian War Casualties. Trump Officials Scrapped It.

from the avoidable-tragedies dept

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

Images from the missile strike in southern Iran were more horrifying than any of the case studies Air Force combat veteran Wes J. Bryant had pored over in his mission to overhaul how the U.S. military safeguards civilian life.

Parents wept over their children’s bodies. Crushed desks and blood-stained backpacks poked through the rubble. The death toll from the attack on an elementary school in Minab climbed past 165, most of them under age 12, with nearly 100 others wounded, according to Iranian health officials. Photos of small coffins and rows of fresh graves went viral, a devastating emblem of Day 1 in the open-ended U.S.-Israeli war in Iran.

Bryant, a former special operations targeting specialist, said he couldn’t help but think of what-ifs as he monitored fallout from the Feb. 28 attack.

Just over a year ago, he had been a senior adviser in an ambitious new Defense Department program aimed at reducing civilian harm during operations. Finally, Bryant said, the military was getting serious about reforms. He worked out of a newly opened Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, where his supervisor was a veteran strike-team targeter who had served as a United Nations war crimes investigator.

Today, that momentum is gone. Bryant was forced out of government in cuts last spring. The civilian protection mission was dissolved as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made “lethality” a top priority. And the world has witnessed a tragedy in Minab that, if U.S. responsibility is confirmed, would be the most civilians killed by the military in a single attack in decades.

Dismantling the fledgling harm-reduction effort, defense analysts say, is among several ways the Trump administration has reorganized national security around two principles: more aggression, less accountability.

Trump and his aides lowered the authorization level for lethal force, broadened target categories, inflated threat assessments and fired inspectors general, according to more than a dozen current and former national security personnel. Nearly all spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

“We’re departing from the rules and norms that we’ve tried to establish as a global community since at least World War II,” Bryant said. “There’s zero accountability.”

Citing open-source intelligence and government officials, several news outlets have concluded that the strike in Minab most likely was carried out by the United States. President Donald Trump, without providing evidence, told reporters March 7 that it was “done by Iran.” Hegseth, standing next to the president aboard Air Force One, said the matter was under investigation.

The next day, the open-source research outfit Bellingcat said it had authenticated a video showing a Tomahawk missile strike next to the school in Minab. Iranian state media later showed fragments of a U.S.-made Tomahawk, as identified by Bellingcat and others, at the site. The United States is the only party to the conflict known to possess Tomahawks. U.N. human rights experts have called for an investigation into whether the attack violated international law.

The Department of Defense and White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Since the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, successive U.S. administrations have faced controversies over civilian deaths. Defense officials eager to shed the legacy of the “forever wars” have periodically called for better protections for civilians, but there was no standardized framework until 2022, when Biden-era leaders adopted a strategy rooted in work that had begun under the first Trump presidency.

Formalized in a 2022 action plan and in a Defense Department instruction, the initiatives are known collectively as Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, a clunky name often shortened to CHMR and pronounced “chimmer.” Around 200 personnel were assigned to the mission, including roughly 30 at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, a coordination hub near the Pentagon.

The CHMR strategy calls for more in-depth planning before an attack, such as real-time mapping of the civilian presence in an area and in-depth analysis of the risks. After an operation, reports of harm to noncombatants would prompt an assessment or investigation to figure out what went wrong and then incorporate those lessons into training.

By the time Trump returned to power, harm-mitigation teams were embedded with regional commands and special operations leadership. During Senate confirmation hearings, several Trump nominees for top defense posts voiced support for the mission. Once in office, however, they stood by as the program was gutted, current and former national security officials said.

Around 90% of the CHMR mission is gone, former personnel said, with no more than a single adviser now at most commands. At Central Command, where a 10-person team was cut to one, “a handful” of the eliminated positions were backfilled to help with the Iran campaign. Defense officials can’t formally close the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence without congressional approval, but Bryant and others say it now exists mostly on paper.

“It has no mission or mandate or budget,” Bryant said.

Spike in Strikes

Global conflict monitors have since recorded a dramatic increase in deadly U.S. military operations. Even before the Iran campaign, the number of strikes worldwide since Trump returned to office had surpassed the total from all four years of Joe Biden’s presidency.

Had the Defense Department’s harm-reduction mission continued apace, current and former officials say, the policies almost certainly would’ve reduced the number of noncombatants harmed over the past year.

Beyond the moral considerations, they added, civilian casualties fuel militant recruiting and hinder intelligence-gathering. Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, explains the risk in an equation he calls “insurgent math”: For every innocent killed, at least 10 new enemies are created.

U.S.-Israeli strikes have already killed more than 1,200 civilians in Iran, including nearly 200 children, according to Human Rights Activists News Agency, a U.S.-based group that verifies casualties through a network in Iran. The group says hundreds more deaths are under review, a difficult process given Iran’s internet blackout and dangerous conditions.

Defense analysts say the civilian toll of the Iran campaign, on top of dozens of recent noncombatant casualties in Yemen and Somalia, reopens dark chapters from the “war on terror” that had prompted reforms in the first place.

“It’s a recipe for disaster,” a senior counterterrorism official who left the government a few months ago said of the Trump administration’s yearlong bombing spree. “It’s ‘Groundhog Day’ — every day we’re just killing people and making more enemies.”

In 2015, two dozen patients and 14 staff members were killed when a heavily armed U.S. gunship fired for over an hour on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in northern Afghanistan, a disaster that has become a cautionary tale for military planners.

“Our patients burned in their beds, our medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs. Others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building,” the international aid group said in a report about the destruction of its trauma center in Kunduz.

A U.S. military investigation found that multiple human and systems errors had resulted in the strike team mistaking the building for a Taliban target. The Obama administration apologized and offered payouts of $6,000 to families of the dead.

Human rights advocates had hoped the Kunduz debacle would force the U.S. military into taking concrete steps to protect civilians during U.S. combat operations. Within a couple years, however, the issue came roaring back with high civilian casualties in U.S.-led efforts to dislodge Islamic State extremists from strongholds in Syria and Iraq.

In a single week in March 2017, U.S. operations resulted in three incidents of mass civilian casualties: A drone attack on a mosque in Syria killed around 50; a strike in another part of Syria killed 40 in a school filled with displaced families; and bombing in the Iraqi city of Mosul led to a building collapse that killed more than 100 people taking shelter inside.

In heavy U.S. fighting to break Islamic State control over the Syrian city of Raqqa, “military leaders too often lacked a complete picture of conditions on the ground; too often waved off reports of civilian casualties; and too rarely learned any lessons from strikes gone wrong,” according to an analysis by the Pentagon-adjacent Rand Corp. think tank.

“Do It Right Now”

Under pressure from lawmakers, Trump’s then-Defense Secretary James Mattis ordered a review of civilian casualty protocols.

Released in 2019, the review Mattis launched was seen by some advocacy groups as narrow in scope but still a step in the right direction. Yet the issue soon dropped from national discourse, overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic and landmark racial justice protests.

During the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in August 2021, a missile strike in Kabul killed an aid worker and nine of his relatives, including seven children. Then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin apologized and said the department would “endeavor to learn from this horrible mistake.”

That incident, along with a New York Times investigative series into deaths from U.S. airstrikes, spurred the adoption of the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response action plan in 2022. When they established the new Civilian Protection Center of Excellence the next year, defense officials tapped Michael McNerney — the lead author of the blunt RAND report — to be its director.

“The strike against the aid worker and his family in Kabul pushed Austin to say, ‘Do it right now,’” Bryant said.

The first harm-mitigation teams were assigned to leaders in charge of some of the military’s most sensitive counterterrorism and intelligence-gathering operations: Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida; the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; and Africa Command in Stuttgart, Germany.

A former CHMR adviser who joined in 2024 after a career in international conflict work said he was reassured to find a serious campaign with a $7 million budget and deep expertise. The adviser spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

Only a few years before, he recalled, he’d had to plead with the Pentagon to pay attention. “It was like a back-of-the-envelope thing — the cost of a Hellfire missile and the cost of hiring people to work on this.”

Bryant became the de facto liaison between the harm-mitigation team and special operations commanders. In December, he described the experience in detail in a private briefing for aides of Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who had sought information on civilian casualty protocols involving boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea.

Bryant’s notes from the briefing, reviewed by ProPublica, describe an embrace of the CHMR mission by Adm. Frank Bradley, who at the time was head of the Joint Special Operations Command. In October, Bradley was promoted to lead Special Operations Command.

At the end of 2024 and into early 2025, Bryant worked closely with the commander’s staff. The notes describe Bradley as “incredibly supportive” of the three-person CHMR team embedded in his command.

Bradley, Bryant wrote, directed “comprehensive lookbacks” on civilian casualties in errant strikes and used the findings to mandate changes. He also introduced training on how to integrate harm prevention and international law into operations against high-value targets. “We viewed Bradley as a model,” Bryant said.

Still, the military remained slow to offer compensation to victims and some of the new policies were difficult to independently monitor, according to a report by the Stimson Center, a foreign policy think tank. The CHMR program also faced opposition from critics who say civilian protections are already baked into laws of war and targeting protocols; the argument is that extra oversight “could have a chilling effect” on commanders’ abilities to quickly tailor operations.

To keep reforms on track, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would have to break through a culture of denial among leaders who pride themselves on precision and moral authority.

“The initial gut response of all commands,” Bryant said, “is: ‘No, we didn’t kill civilians.’”

Reforms Unraveled

As the Trump administration returned to the White House pledging deep cuts across the federal government, military and political leaders scrambled to preserve the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response framework.

At first, CHMR advisers were heartened by Senate confirmation hearings where Trump’s nominees for senior defense posts affirmed support for civilian protections.

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote during his confirmation that commanders “see positive impacts from the program.” Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of defense for policy, wrote that it’s in the national interest to “seek to reduce civilian harm to the degree possible.”

When questioned about cuts to the CHMR mission at a hearing last summer, U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, head of Central Command, said he was committed to integrating the ideas as “part of our culture.”

Despite the top-level support, current and former officials say, the CHMR mission didn’t stand a chance under Hegseth’s signature lethality doctrine.

The former Fox News personality, who served as an Army National Guard infantry officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, disdains rules of engagement and other guardrails as constraining to the “warrior ethos.” He has defended U.S. troops accused of war crimes, including a Navy SEAL charged with stabbing an imprisoned teenage militant to death and then posing for a photo with the corpse.

A month after taking charge, Hegseth fired the military’s top judge advocate generals, known as JAGs, who provide guidance to keep operations in line with U.S. or international law. Hegseth has described the attorneys as “roadblocks” and used the term “jagoff.”

At the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, the staff tried in vain to save the program. At one point, Bryant said, he even floated the idea of renaming it the “Center for Precision Warfare” to put the mission in terms Hegseth wouldn’t consider “woke.”

By late February 2025, the CHMR mission was imploding, say current and former defense personnel.

Shortly before his job was eliminated, Bryant openly spoke out against the cuts in The Washington Post and Boston Globe, which he said landed him in deep trouble at the Pentagon. He was placed on leave in March, his security clearance at risk of revocation.

Bryant formally resigned in September and has since become a vocal critic of the administration’s defense policies. In columns and on TV, he warns that Hegseth’s cavalier attitude toward the rule of law and civilian protections is corroding military professionalism.

Bryant said it was hard to watch Bradley, the special operations commander and enthusiastic adopter of CHMR, defending a controversial “double-tap” on an alleged drug boat in which survivors of a first strike were killed in a follow-up hit. Legal experts have said such strikes could violate laws of warfare. Bradley did not respond to a request for comment.

“Everything else starts slipping when you have this culture of higher tolerance for civilian casualties,” Bryant said.

Concerns were renewed in early 2025 with the Trump administration’s revived counterterrorism campaign against Islamist militants regrouping in parts of Africa and the Middle East.

Last April, a U.S. air strike hit a migrant detention center in northwestern Yemen, killing at least 61 African migrants and injuring dozens of others in what Amnesty International says “qualifies as an indiscriminate attack and should be investigated as a war crime.”

Operations in Somalia also have become more lethal. In 2024, Biden’s last year in office, conflict monitors recorded 21 strikes in Somalia, with a combined death toll of 189. In year one of Trump’s second term, the U.S. carried out at least 125 strikes, with reported fatalities as high as 359, according to the New America think tank, which monitors counterterrorism operations.

“It is a strategy focused primarily on killing people,” said Alexander Palmer, a terrorism researcher at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Last September, the U.S. military announced an attack in northeastern Somalia targeting a weapons dealer for the Islamist militia Al-Shabaab, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. On the ground, however, villagers said the missile strike incinerated Omar Abdullahi, a respected elder nicknamed “Omar Peacemaker” for his role as a clan mediator.

After the death, the U.S. military released no details, citing operational security.

“The U.S. killed an innocent man without proof or remorse,” Abdullahi’s brother, Ali, told Somali news outlets. “He preached peace, not war. Now his blood stains our soil.”

In Iran, former personnel say, the CHMR mission could have made a difference.

Under the scrapped harm-prevention framework, they said, plans for civilian protection would’ve begun months ago, when orders to draw up a potential Iran campaign likely came down from the White House and Pentagon.

CHMR personnel across commands would immediately begin a detailed mapping of what planners call “the civilian environment,” in this case a picture of the infrastructure and movements of ordinary Iranians. They would also check and update the “no-strike list,” which names civilian targets such as schools and hospitals that are strictly off-limits.

One key question is whether the school was on the no-strike list. It sits a few yards from a naval base for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The building was formerly part of the base, though it has been marked on maps as a school since at least 2013, according to visual forensics investigations.

“Whoever ‘hits the button’ on a Tomahawk — they’re part of a system,” the former adviser said. “What you want is for that person to feel really confident that when they hit that button, they’re not going to hit schoolchildren.”

If the guardrails failed and the Defense Department faced a disaster like the school strike, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would’ve jumped in to help with transparent public statements and an immediate inquiry.

Instead, he called the Trump administration’s response to the attack “shameful.”

“It’s back to where we were years ago,” Bryant said. If confirmed, “this will go down as one of the most egregious failures in targeting and civilian harm-mitigation in modern U.S. history.”

Filed Under: civilian casualties, civilian protection, dod, donald trump, iran, pete hegseth, trump administration, war crimes, wes bryant

Anthropic’s Statement To The ‘Department Of War’ Reads Like A Hostage Note Written In Business Casual

from the please-don't-kill-us-mr.-dictator dept

We’ve been covering the ongoing saga of the Trump administration’s attempt to destroy Anthropic for the sin of having modest ethical guidelines around its AI technology.

The short version: Anthropic said it didn’t want its AI making autonomous kill decisions without human oversight. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded by declaring the company a supply chain risk—a designation designed for foreign adversaries, not San Francisco companies with ethics policies—and ordering every federal agency to purge Anthropic’s technology. Now Anthropic is back at the negotiating table with the same people who just tried to kill it.

On Thursday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a new statement about “where things stand” with the Defense Department. And it is… something. It reads like what happens when a serious person at a serious company has to write a serious document in an environment that has gone completely insane—and the result is a press release that, under any previous administration, would have been recognized as deeply alarming corporate groveling, but which now just kind of… slides into the news cycle as another Thursday.

The statement is titled “Where things stand with the Department of War.” Not the Department of Defense. The Department of War. Yes, Trump and Hegseth have spent hundreds of millions of dollars renaming the Defense Department, but it’s not up to them. It’s up to Congress. According to the law, it’s still the Department of Defense, and anyone using the name Department of War is clearly sucking up to the administration. It’s all theater.

Amodei uses the fictitious name throughout his statement. Every single reference. “Department of War.” This is a company that six days ago was being praised for standing on principle, and its CEO can’t even bring himself to use the department’s legal name because the administration insists upon everyone using the cosplay version. Before you even get to the substance, the document has already bent the knee. He’s negotiating with people who branded him a national security threat, and he opens by adopting their preferred terminology like a hostage reading a prepared script.

From there, the statement proceeds through a series of passages that are individually rational and collectively dystopian. Take this section:

I would like to reiterate that we had been having productive conversations with the Department of War over the last several days, both about ways we could serve the Department that adhere to our two narrow exceptions, and ways for us to ensure a smooth transition if that is not possible. As we wrote on Thursday, we are very proud of the work we have done together with the Department, supporting frontline warfighters with applications such as intelligence analysis, modeling and simulation, operational planning, cyber operations, and more.

“We are very proud of the work we have done together with the Department”—the department that is currently trying to destroy the company over a contractual dispute. The department whose secretary called Anthropic’s stance “a master class in arrogance and betrayal” and “a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives.” The department that declared Anthropic a supply chain risk to national security—again, a designation designed for hostile foreign infiltration of military systems, not for a San Francisco company that said “maybe a human should be in the loop before the robot decides to kill someone.”

And here’s Dario, proudly listing all the ways Anthropic has served these same people. “Supporting frontline warfighters.” This is the language of a Pentagon press release. Six days. It took six days to go from “we have principles about autonomous weapons” to “we are very proud of supporting frontline warfighters with cyber operations.”

This may be a rational decision from a company trying to stave off a ridiculous fight, but the real story is that they feel the need to act this way.

Then there’s the apology. Earlier this week, an internal Amodei memo leaked in which he described OpenAI’s rushed Pentagon deal as “safety theater” and “straight up lies,” and noted that the key difference between the two companies’ positions was that OpenAI “cared about placating employees” while Anthropic “actually cared about preventing abuses.” It was blunt. It was competitive. It also appeared to be accurate—OpenAI subsequently rewrote its contract to address many of the concerns Amodei identified.

But accuracy is apparently a liability now:

I also want to apologize directly for a post internal to the company that was leaked to the press yesterday. Anthropic did not leak this post nor direct anyone else to do so—it is not in our interest to escalate this situation. That particular post was written within a few hours of the President’s Truth Social post announcing Anthropic would be removed from all federal systems, the Secretary of War’s X post announcing the supply chain risk designation, and the announcement of a deal between the Pentagon and OpenAI, which even OpenAI later characterized as confusing. It was a difficult day for the company, and I apologize for the tone of the post. It does not reflect my careful or considered views. It was also written six days ago, and is an out-of-date assessment of the current situation.

He is apologizing for the tone of an accurate description of events because the accurate description made the people trying to destroy his company unhappy. He notes it was “a difficult day for the company”—the day the President of the United States directed every federal agency to cease using your technology and the Defense Secretary branded you a threat to national security. Yeah, I’d call that a difficult day. And on that difficult day, Amodei accurately described what was happening, and now he has to say sorry for it because the accurate description “does not reflect my careful or considered views.”

Translation: the careful and considered view is that you don’t say true things out loud when the administration is watching and deeply focused on punishing you.

And then we arrive at the closing:

Our most important priority right now is making sure that our warfighters and national security experts are not deprived of important tools in the middle of major combat operations. Anthropic will provide our models to the Department of War and national security community, at nominal cost and with continuing support from our engineers, for as long as is necessary to make that transition, and for as long as we are permitted to do so.

Anthropic is offering to provide its AI models to the military at nominal cost—essentially a discount—while simultaneously preparing to challenge the supply chain risk designation in court. The company is saying: “We believe your action against us is illegal, we will fight it in court, and also here’s our technology at a steep discount, please don’t hurt us anymore.”

And the framing: “Our most important priority right now is making sure that our warfighters… are not deprived of important tools in the middle of major combat operations.” This is Anthropic fully adopting Hegseth’s rhetoric—the exact framing that was used to justify the attack on them in the first place. Hegseth’s entire argument was that Anthropic’s ethical guidelines were depriving “warfighters” of critical tools. And now Anthropic is echoing that language as though it were their own concern all along. The “warfighters” language is especially rich given that this administration keeps tap dancing around the question of whether we’re actually “at war” with Iran—apparently we have warfighters who aren’t fighting a war.

The statement closes with what might be the single most remarkable sentence:

Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences. We both are committed to advancing US national security and defending the American people, and agree on the urgency of applying AI across the government. All our future decisions will flow from that shared premise.

Remember, this company was founded by people who left OpenAI specifically because they thought AI safety was being treated as an afterthought. Their entire brand, their entire reason for existing, was the proposition that there are some things AI should not be used for without significant guardrails. “Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences” is the kind of sentence you write when survival has replaced principle as the operating framework.

Every individual decision in this statement is probably the rational play. Using the administration’s preferred name costs nothing. Apologizing for the memo reduces friction. “Warfighter” language signals alignment. These are survival tactics, and they’re being deployed by someone who appears to have no good options.

That’s the actual horror. This is what the “good” decisions look like in an authoritarian world.

Under any previous administration—Democrat or Republican—a company telling the Defense Department “we’d prefer our AI not make autonomous kill decisions without human oversight” would have been a mostly unremarkable negotiating position. It might have been a deal breaker for that particular contract. The two sides might have parted ways. What would not have happened is the Secretary of Defense going on social media to accuse the company of “betrayal” and “duplicity,” the President directing all federal agencies to stop using the company’s products, and the company’s CEO subsequently having to write a public groveling statement apologizing for having accurately described the situation while pledging free labor to the government that attacked him.

And every AI company watching this—every tech company of any kind—is absorbing the lesson. Tell the administration “no” on even the most modest ethical point, and this is what follows: a week of chaos, a supply chain risk designation, your CEO apologizing for telling the truth, and a press release pledging your technology to the military at cost while you simultaneously sue to stay alive.

As I wrote last year, authoritarian systems are fundamentally incompatible with innovation. They produce exactly this kind of environment—one where the rational move for a company is to grovel in public while fighting in court, to adopt the language of the people attacking you, and to apologize for having been right. The AI bros who supported Trump because Biden’s AI plan involved some annoying paperwork should take a long look at this statement and ask themselves whether this is the “pro-innovation” environment they were promised.

Because right now, the most “pro-innovation” thing happening in American AI is a hostage note written in business casual—and everyone pretending it’s just a press release.

Filed Under: ai, dario amodei, defense department, hostage negotiation, pete hegseth, supply chain risk
Companies: anthropic

OpenAI’s ‘Red Lines’ Are Written In The NSA’s Dictionary—Where Words Mean What The NSA Wants Them To Mean

from the trusting-the-wrong-people dept

Within hours on Friday, the Pentagon blacklisted one AI company for refusing to drop its safety commitments on surveillance and autonomous weapons, then turned around and praised a competitor for signing a deal that supposedly preserved those exact same commitments.

This confused some people. Why would the Pentagon seek to destroy one company over the same terms it agreed to with its largest competitor just hours later?

There’s an answer though: the words in OpenAI’s contract likely don’t mean what most people think they mean.

This isn’t speculation about future abuse. It’s the documented operating procedure of the NSA for decades—a practice exposed repeatedly by whistleblowers, litigated in courts, and eventually confirmed in declassified documents.

OpenAI published the broad contours of its agreement, positioning it as having more guardrails than any previous deal, including Anthropic’s. The company lists three “red lines”:

No use of OpenAI technology for mass domestic surveillance. No use of OpenAI technology to direct autonomous weapons systems. No use of OpenAI technology for high-stakes automated decisions (e.g. systems such as “social credit”).

Sounds great, right? Who wouldn’t support that? The problem becomes apparent only when you read the actual contract language OpenAI published, and specifically, the legal authorities it cites as defining what constitutes “lawful” behavior by the Pentagon:

For intelligence activities, any handling of private information will comply with the Fourth Amendment, the National Security Act of 1947 and the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act of 1978, Executive Order 12333, and applicable DoD directives requiring a defined foreign intelligence purpose. The AI System shall not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. persons’ private information as consistent with these authorities.

If you’ve spent any time studying how the NSA actually operates, that reference to Executive Order 12333 should make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Because EO 12333 is, in practice, one of the largest loopholes for surveilling Americans’ communications that the intelligence community possesses. And by defining its “red lines” as compliance with these authorities, OpenAI has effectively adopted the intelligence community’s dictionary—a dictionary in which common English words have been carefully redefined over decades to permit the very things they appear to prohibit.

We’ve covered this extensively over the years, because understanding how the NSA plays word games is critical to understanding basically anything it claims about surveillance. As a former State Department official, John Napier Tye, explained back in 2014 in the Washington Post:

Executive Order 12333 contains no such protections for U.S. persons if the collection occurs outside U.S. borders. Issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 to authorize foreign intelligence investigations, 12333 is not a statute and has never been subject to meaningful oversight from Congress or any court….

Unlike Section 215, the executive order authorizes collection of the content of communications, not just metadata, even for U.S. persons. Such persons cannot be individually targeted under 12333 without a court order. However, if the contents of a U.S. person’s communications are “incidentally” collected (an NSA term of art) in the course of a lawful overseas foreign intelligence investigation, then Section 2.3(c) of the executive order explicitly authorizes their retention. It does not require that the affected U.S. persons be suspected of wrongdoing and places no limits on the volume of communications by U.S. persons that may be collected and retained.

That phrase “incidentally collected” is doing enormous work in that paragraph. In NSA-speak, “incidental” collection doesn’t mean “oops, we accidentally grabbed that.” It means “we were targeting a foreigner, and your data happened to be in the giant pile we vacuumed up, so we get to keep it.” As Tye put it:

“Incidental” collection may sound insignificant, but it is a legal loophole that can be stretched very wide. Remember that the NSA is building a data center in Utah five times the size of the U.S. Capitol building, with its own power plant that will reportedly burn $40 million a year in electricity.

“Incidental collection” might need its own power plant.

This is what makes OpenAI’s assurance that its technology won’t be used for “mass domestic surveillance” feel hollow. Under the legal framework OpenAI has explicitly agreed to operate within, the NSA can target a foreign person, scoop up vast quantities of Americans’ communications in the process, retain all of it, and search through it later—and none of that counts as “surveillance of U.S. persons” by the government’s own definitions.

The folks over at EFF explained this same dynamic back in 2013, walking through how the word “target” itself had been stretched beyond recognition:

In plain English: the NSA believes it not only can (1) intercept the communications of the target, but also (2) intercept communications about a target, even if the target isn’t a party to the communication. The most likely way to assess if a communication is “about” a target is to conduct a content analysis of communications, probably based on specific search terms or selectors.

And that, folks, is what we call a content dragnet.

Importantly, under the NSA’s rules, when the agency intercepts communications about a target, the author or speaker of those communications does not, thereby, become a target: the target remains the original, non-US person. But, because the target remains a non-US person, the most robust protection for Americans’ communications under the FISA Amendments Act (and, indeed, the primary reassurance the government has given about the surveillance) flies out the window.

So when OpenAI’s contract says its technology will be used in compliance with these authorities, and “shall not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. persons’ private information as consistent with these authorities,” what does that actually mean? It means: the government gets to define what counts as “unconstrained monitoring” and what counts as “U.S. persons’ private information,” using definitions that have been purpose-built over decades to permit exactly the kind of bulk collection that a reasonable person would call “mass domestic surveillance.”

Note also the careful qualifier: “unconstrained monitoring.” That word “unconstrained” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Under the government’s framework, surveillance that operates under any constraint—even the fig leaf of “we were targeting a foreigner and your data just showed up”—is, by definition, constrained. So the contract arguably permits all of the surveillance the NSA already does, because the NSA would say none of it is unconstrained. It all has rules! The rules just happen to permit collecting and keeping basically everything.

This is precisely where the breakdown between Anthropic and the Pentagon becomes illuminating. According to reporting in the New York Times, the final sticking point was something much more concrete:

Mr. Michael, who was on a call with Anthropic executives at the time, said the Pentagon wanted the company to allow for the collection and analysis of unclassified, commercial bulk data on Americans, such as geolocation and web browsing data, people briefed on the negotiations said.

Anthropic told the Pentagon that it was willing to let its technology be used by the National Security Agency for classified material collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But the company wanted a legally binding promise from the Pentagon not to use its technology on unclassified commercial data.

Apparently, Anthropic was willing to let the NSA use its AI on classified intelligence material collected under FISA. That’s already a significant concession to the national security establishment. What Anthropic wouldn’t do is let the Pentagon use its AI to trawl through the commercially available data that data brokers sell about Americans—your geolocation data, your browsing history, your credit card transactions. Anthropic wanted a legally binding commitment that this wouldn’t happen.

The Pentagon said no. And OpenAI’s published contract language is conspicuously silent on commercial bulk data.

OpenAI’s announcement instead points to compliance with EO 12333 and other existing authorities as its safeguard. But as Tye noted back in 2014, the intelligence community has historically used the distinction between data collected inside and outside the United States to avoid oversight entirely—and in an era where your email from New York to New Jersey bounces through servers in Brazil, Japan, and the UK, that distinction has become essentially meaningless:

A legal regime in which U.S. citizens’ data receives different levels of privacy and oversight, depending on whether it is collected inside or outside U.S. borders, may have made sense when most communications by U.S. persons stayed inside the United States. But today, U.S. communications increasingly travel across U.S. borders — or are stored beyond them. For example, the Google and Yahoo e-mail systems rely on networks of “mirror” servers located throughout the world. An e-mail from New York to New Jersey is likely to wind up on servers in Brazil, Japan and Britain. The same is true for most purely domestic communications.

Executive Order 12333 contains nothing to prevent the NSA from collecting and storing all such communications — content as well as metadata — provided that such collection occurs outside the United States in the course of a lawful foreign intelligence investigation. No warrant or court approval is required, and such collection never need be reported to Congress.

So OpenAI’s “red line” against “mass domestic surveillance” is defined by compliance with legal authorities that, in practice, permit the collection of enormous quantities of Americans’ communications data without warrants, without court approval, and without congressional oversight. That’s the “safeguard.”

Then there’s the autonomous weapons question. OpenAI makes a big deal about the fact that its deployment is “cloud-only” and therefore cannot power autonomous weapons, which would require “edge deployment.” This sounds like a meaningful technical limitation. Anthropic initially considered a similar distinction and, as the Atlantic reported, rejected it:

According to my source, at one point during the negotiation, it was suggested that this impasse over autonomous weapons could be resolved if the Pentagon would simply promise to keep the company’s AI in the cloud, and out of the weapons themselves. The argument was that the models could be kept outside so-called edge systems, be they drones or other kinds of autonomous weapons. They might synthesize intelligence before an operation, but they wouldn’t actually be making kill decisions. The AI’s hands would be clean of any deadly errors that the drones made.

But Anthropic wasn’t satisfied by this solution. The company reasoned that in modern military AI architectures, the distinction between the cloud and the edge is no longer all that defined. It’s less a wall and more of a gradient. Drones on the battlefield can now be orchestrated through mesh networks that include cloud data centers. And although they’re designed to survive on their own, the military’s impulse will always be to maintain as much connectivity between them and the most powerful models in the cloud; the better the connection, the more intelligent the machine.

Indeed, the Pentagon has been working hard to keep the cloud as involved as possible. Part of the goal of its Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability is to push computing resources closer to the fight. The AI may be sitting in an Amazon Web Services server in Virginia rather than a war zone overseas, but if it’s making battlefield decisions, from an ethical standpoint, that’s a distinction without much difference. Anthropic ended up discarding the idea that the cloud provision could resolve the problem. It didn’t take much analysis, according to the source close to the talks.

So the “cloud-only” limitation that forms the centerpiece of OpenAI’s assurance on autonomous weapons is the same limitation that Anthropic considered and quickly dismissed as inadequate. The Pentagon’s own infrastructure programs are specifically designed to blur the line between cloud and edge. An AI model sitting halfway around the world feeding targeting decisions to a drone swarm through a mesh network is, from any functional standpoint, directing an autonomous weapons system. But under OpenAI’s framing, because the model is technically in “the cloud,” the red line remains intact.

This is the pattern. At every turn, OpenAI’s “red lines” are defined not by what a reasonable person would understand those words to mean, but by the government’s carefully constructed legal definitions—definitions that have been engineered, refined, and battle-tested over decades to allow the intelligence community to do the thing while truthfully claiming it’s not doing the thing.

OpenAI either doesn’t understand this history, or (far more likely) understands it perfectly well and has decided that adopting the government’s dictionary is good enough cover. As the Atlantic noted, nearly 100 OpenAI employees signed an open letter indicating they supported the same red lines as Anthropic. They may want to look very carefully at whether the company’s contract actually delivers what it promises.

OpenAI’s defenders will point to the layered safeguards: the cloud-only architecture, the contractual language, the cleared OpenAI engineers in the loop. These aren’t nothing. But they all operate within a framework where the definitions of “surveillance,” “targeting,” and “lawful” have already been handed to the government. Human oversight matters, but not when the humans are operating under rules designed to allow the thing you’re supposedly preventing.

The most revealing line in OpenAI’s entire announcement might be this, from its FAQ:

It was clear in our interaction that the DoW considers mass domestic surveillance illegal and was not planning to use it for this purpose.

And if you’re wondering whether this administration’s assurances about how it will use AI tools are worth the paper they’re printed on, the same Defense Department that just signed this deal launched strikes on Iran within hours—without congressional authorization. The people OpenAI is trusting to self-police their surveillance activities are the same people who apparently consider laws constraining military action more of a suggestion.

The Department of Defense “considers mass domestic surveillance illegal.” Well, sure it does—by its own definitions. The NSA has always considered its activities legal by its own definitions. That’s the whole trick. The NSA would tell you, with a straight face, that it has never conducted mass domestic surveillance, because under its interpretations of the relevant authorities, what it does doesn’t count as “mass domestic surveillance.” It’s “targeted collection” with “incidental” acquisition of U.S. persons’ data that gets retained under minimization procedures approved by the Attorney General, not a court. Totally different thing. Just ask them.

Anthropic looked at the government’s assurances and said: we know how this works, we’ve seen this movie, we want legally binding commitments that go beyond the existing authorities. OpenAI looked at those same assurances and said: sounds good to us.

Which brings us to how OpenAI keeps trying to shape this message. Here’s Sam Altman downplaying all of this:

“We do not want the ability to opine on a specific (and legal) military action. But we do really want the ability to use our expertise to design a safe system.” That’s a perfectly reasonable-sounding position. The problem is that “legal” is doing all the work in that sentence, and as we’ve spent the last decade learning, the government’s definition of “legal” when it comes to surveillance and military technology has been stretched so far beyond common understanding that the word has become almost meaningless as a safeguard.

OpenAI didn’t hold the same line as Anthropic. It drew a line on a map using coordinates provided by the very entity it was supposed to be constraining.

Filed Under: defense department, executive order 12333, incidental collection, mass surveillance, nsa, pete hegseth, sam altman, surveillance
Companies: anthropic, openai

AI Bros Wanted Trump. Now They Learn What Happens When You Tell Him No.

from the guess-your-chatbots-can't-predict-the-future-very-well dept

Last year, in Fascism For First Time Founders, I warned the tech industry what happens when you cozy up to authoritarians. As I wrote then:

Innovation requires trust. Not just between individuals, but institutional trust. People need to believe that contracts will be enforced, that property rights will be protected, that the rules won’t change arbitrarily based on the whims of whoever’s in charge.

Building a startup requires long-term thinking. You’re asking employees to bet their careers on your vision. You’re asking investors to put money into something that might not pay off for years. You’re asking customers to trust that your product will be supported and improved over time.

None of that works in an environment where the rules change based on political caprice.

As you’ve probably heard, on Friday that political caprice came home to roost for many in Silicon Valley when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced he was declaring Anthropic a “supply chain risk” and that no one with US military contracts could have a commercial relationship with the company any more (a gross exaggeration of what being declared a supply chain risk actually means, but that’s besides the point).

We’ve criticized these “supply chain risk” designations going back years, but mainly for how they tend to be used to prop up American companies against foreign (usually Chinese) competitors with little evidence regarding the actual risk. Of course, you can easily understand the stated intent of an “SCR” designation: if there’s a foreign company with ties to a government that is averse to the US, there is always a risk that the company could agree to sneak backdoors or spyware into the network and do something bad. Hell, it’s what the US does.

But here, it makes no sense at all. The only “risk” was Anthropic saying its technology shouldn’t be used for domestic mass surveillance or to power autonomous killing machines. There is no underlying risk.

It’s worth pausing to note just how modest Anthropic’s red line actually was. They weren’t refusing to work with the military. They weren’t demanding the Pentagon adopt pacifism. They simply said their AI shouldn’t make kill decisions without a human in the loop, and shouldn’t be used for mass surveillance of American citizens. That’s it. That’s the “duplicity” and “betrayal” that Hegseth is ranting about. A company said “maybe don’t let the robot decide who dies on its own” and the response was to try to destroy them.

Hell, the entire point of the designation had nothing to do with any actual risk. It was a clear attempt by the US government to destroy a tech company that pushed back ever so slightly on the Trump administration.

Just like we warned last year in the fascism piece, that government will always turn on you:

Every authoritarian regime in history has eventually turned on the business community that initially supported it. The oligarchs who think they can control the dictator always end up learning the hard way that the dictator controls them.

And yet, the AI bros went hard for Trump. As someone who still finds the tech to be quite useful when used in thoughtful, careful ways, this is part of what has frustrated me. So many people in the AI space went out of their way to insist that if they just got Trump elected, it would be clear sailing for AI.

If you listen to some Silicon Valley VC bro podcasts, there was a common refrain: the Biden admin supposedly tried to destroy tech, and how much better Trump is for tech. Every time I hear that it makes me wonder what sort of world these people live in.

It’s true that the Biden administration’s policy on AI was not great. It was clear that it was influenced by too many knee-jerk “AI doomers,” but ultimately the actual policy was a toothless set of principles, while asking federal government employees to take some steps to push for more responsible AI tools, and that was about it. It didn’t really do much at all, and certainly didn’t do anything meaningful in slowing down or limiting AI companies.

But, to hear the AI bros who rushed out to loudly support Trump, Biden was trying to destroy the entire American AI industry and hand it to China.

Yet, on Friday, it was the Trump admin that was out there trying to actually destroy the American AI industry. Pete Hegseth’s tweet is unlike anything you ever saw or heard from the Biden admin:

If you can’t see the image, it’s a pathetically long tweet that reads:

This week, Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon.

Our position has never wavered and will never waver: the Department of War must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic’s models for every LAWFUL purpose in defense of the Republic.

Instead, Anthropic and its CEO Dario Amodei, have chosen duplicity. Cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of “effective altruism,” they have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission – a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives.

The Terms of Service of Anthropic’s defective altruism will never outweigh the safety, the readiness, or the lives of American troops on the battlefield.

Their true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military. That is unacceptable.

As President Trump stated on Truth Social, the Commander-in-Chief and the American people alone will determine the destiny of our armed forces, not unelected tech executives.

Anthropic’s stance is fundamentally incompatible with American principles. Their relationship with the United States Armed Forces and the Federal Government has therefore been permanently altered.

In conjunction with the President’s directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic’s technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service.

America’s warfighters will never be held hostage by the ideological whims of Big Tech. This decision is final.

I’m sure he thought that “defective altruism” line was really clever.

This wasn’t a total surprise. The two sides had been sparring publicly all week, each daring the other to blink first—a game of bro chicken that ended with Hegseth driving straight into one of the few sectors still propping up the US stock market.

But, fascism destroys the businesses that suck up to it. It creates chaos and uncertainty. Again from my piece last year:

Authoritarian systems are fundamentally unpredictable. The rules change based on the leader’s mood, personal vendettas, or political needs. That’s the opposite of the stable, predictable environment that innovation requires. When political favor matters more than legal precedent, no one can plan for the future.

Fascism destroys everything that makes innovation work right. The fact that, on a random Friday evening, the Secretary of Defense can claim that he can force anyone who does business with the US military to cut all ties to one business that slightly annoyed him during contract negotiations is exactly the kind of nonsense I was discussing.

This is the kind of chaos you get. Not reasoned debate. Not a simple decision to part ways of a contract dispute. No, the Trump administration decided to destroy a company for the sin of telling it no.

That Sam Altman quickly swooped in to grab a contract from the Defense Department doesn’t much matter in the grand scheme of things (we’ll cover the sneaky details of that arrangement separately).

It does, kinda, matter that Hegseth turned a simple contract dispute into an attempted corporate death sentence, weaponizing a supply-chain security designation that was clearly designed for tech the US government fears could be infiltrated by hostile foreign nations.

Yet, under Hegseth’s order, Chinese AI models would technically be more welcome in America’s military supply chain than Anthropic’s. The “supply chain risk” designation is now being used to punish a domestic company for having safety guidelines. DeepSeek, with its direct ties to the Chinese government, faces fewer restrictions than a San Francisco company that committed the cardinal sin of asking for human oversight on killing decisions.

This is what fascism gives you. Not just uncertainty. Not just the destruction of institutions that innovation relies on. But the sheer unadulterated pettiness and vindictive spite of 12-year-old bullies.

Sure, President Biden’s AI plan had a few things that were marginally annoying and probably forced some DC policy people to have to spend a bit more time doing a bit more paperwork. But Biden didn’t tweet out a plan to destroy one of the biggest AI companies because it said “yo, our tech is not safe enough to be making decisions on who to kill without any human review.”

The AI bros who supported Trump should have known this. There’s plenty of history about how this works. They always think that by sucking up to the authoritarian, he’ll give them what they want (the freedom to do whatever they want without consequence).

But that’s not how it works in a fascist society. The fascists will always ask for more. They will always cross your red lines. And if you dare to stand up to them? They will directly and deliberately set out to destroy you as punishment to act as a warning to others never to defy the will of the dictator and his petty henchmen.

Perhaps the funniest response to all this was from Dean Ball, who went into the Trump administration to basically write Trump’s silly AI action plan. Over on X after Hegseth’s announcement, he had a bit of a meltdown about how much damage Hegseth was doing to the entire American AI industry.

Well, yeah, dude. That’s what fascist governments do. You joined the administration to help craft their leopard’s spots strategy and now you’re shocked—shocked—that the leopards started eating faces?

No one comes out of this looking good, of course, no matter what the end result of this mess turns out to be. The Trump administration continues its reputation as a destroyer of basically everything, including the last remaining golden goose that has propped up the stock market for the last year. OpenAI looks opportunistic at best. And Anthropic—which, notably, was never as deeply embedded in the MAGA tech cheerleading squad—is now the example of what happens to anyone in the industry who dares to push back, even modestly. That’s the environment the AI bros who backed Trump created for everyone.

And, again, the public trust in the technology takes another hit. Siding with the strongman wannabe dictator is never a good look, and it reflects poorly on you across the board.

The fact that AI hatred seems to be spreading about as fast as Donald Trump’s approval ratings are falling, perhaps the AI bros should have asked their magic answer machines to predict what happens when you side with a wannabe dictator because you heard that the last guy wanted you to do a bit more paperwork to make sure your AI bots were less likely to do harm.

The “Fascism For First Time Founders” piece was a warning. What happened Friday evening was just an exclamation point.

And hey, to the AI bros who went all in on MAGA? Maybe next time you’re on a podcast complaining about how the government is destroying tech, you could mention that the Biden plan you hated so much was just annoying paperwork, while the guy you vocally supported is out there taking a baseball bat to an entire industry because Pete Hegseth couldn’t get his killing bot.

Gotta love that “American dynamism” at work.

Filed Under: ai, autonomous weapons, dario amodei, donald trump, fascism, pete hegseth, supply chain risk, surveillance
Companies: anthropic, openai

Tech Companies Shouldn’t Be Bullied Into Doing Surveillance

from the surveillance-ai dept

The Secretary of Defense has given an ultimatum to the artificial intelligence company Anthropic in an attempt to bully them into making their technology available to the U.S. military without any restrictions for their use. Anthropic should stick by their principles and refuse to allow their technology to be used in the two ways they have publicly stated they would not support: autonomous weapons systems and surveillance. The Department of Defense has reportedly threatened to label Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” in retribution for not lifting restrictions on how their technology is used. According to WIRED, that label would be, “a scarlet letter usually reserved for companies that do business with countries scrutinized by federal agencies, like China, which means the Pentagon would not do business with firms using Anthropic’s AI in their defense work.”

In 2025, reportedly Anthropic became the first AI company cleared for use in relation to classified operations and to handle classified information. This current controversy, however, began in January 2026 when, through a partnership with defense contractor Palantir, Anthropic came to suspect their AI had been used during the January 3 attack on Venezuela. In January 2026, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote to reiterate that surveillance against US persons and autonomous weapons systems were two “bright red lines” not to be crossed, or at least topics that needed to be handled with “extreme care and scrutiny combined with guardrails to prevent abuses.” You can also read Anthropic’s self-proclaimed core views on AI safety here, as well as their LLM, Claude’s, constitution here. 

Now, the U.S. government is threatening to terminate the government’s contract with the company if it doesn’t switch gears and voluntarily jump right across those lines.  

Companies, especially technology companies, often fail to live up to their public statements and internal policies related to human rights and civil liberties for all sorts of reasons, including profit. Government pressure shouldn’t be one of those reasons. 

Whatever the U.S. government does to threaten Anthropic, the AI company should know that their corporate customers, the public, and the engineers who make their products are expecting them not to cave. They, and all other technology companies, would do best to refuse to become yet another tool of surveillance.

Reposted from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

Filed Under: ai, defense department, pete hegseth, surveillance
Companies: anthropic

Because ICE Is Losing In Minnesota, Hegseth Is Prepping For Actual Martial Law

from the we'll-fuck-them-up-too dept

LOL this government thought actual murder would shut Minneapolis down. You absolute idiots. Whatever kills us makes us stronger. And I say that as only a part-time Minnesotan. I’ve split time between there and South Dakota over the past couple of decades. And Minneapolis never fails to impress.

The administration went all in on Minneapolis after a MAGA grifter claimed a bunch of fraud was being perpetrated by Somali-Americans. Trump, of course, believed this because he hates Minnesota, Somalis, Ilhan Omar, and anything else that looks like it might be a grassroots reaction to his Ministry of Hate.

Cue this latest move by the government, which is still in the “pending” pile. But don’t expect this leash to be held in check for long.

The Pentagon has ordered 1,500 US troops based in Alaska to prepare to deploy to Minnesota as a precautionary measure in case the administration decides to send them, a US official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The unit of the 11th Airborne Division is a cold-weather unit nicknamed “The Arctic Angels.”

Hey, good luck with that. Local businesses are far less willing to feed and house federal officers, given the risk it poses to their own businesses once the locals discover where ICE is shacking up and/or getting its coffee. While DHS officials love to claim any refusal to house federal officers is unamerican af, the reality is that local business owners don’t want the negative publicity and negative public action housing ICE officers might provoke.

You’d think a shrewd businessperson such as Donald Trump would understand. After all, he’s made a career out of strategic bankruptcies and investing in gold leaf futures. He should sympathize with small business owners who don’t want to be whistled/ice-cubed/TripAdvisored into non-existence. But he doesn’t because he only cares about Trump and thinks everyone should be asking “Where’s Trump?” whenever he fails to post to his own social media service 5-10 times a day.

“Arctic Angels” my Midwestern white ass. These won’t be angels. They’ll be on the wrong side of history for as long as history persists, which tends to be forever. (Just ask the Roman Empire figures you idolize, you stupid white nationalist fucks.)

It’s not just the Army that might be coming for Minneapolis, the home of Minnesota Nice and interpretations of cold weather that defy scientific measurement. You may have trained in Alaska, but have you ever been whistled into submission by people who know how to walk on ice without falling flat on their ass?

I submit to you that you are not ready to deal with Minnesota. No one is. The administration is still flustered by Portland, Oregon, where inflatable animal costumes have beaten ICE into semi-submission.

Bringing in the FBI isn’t going to change anything, especially when it’s still headed by an insurrection enabler that has been elevated to a level of infamy even his worst enemies would only hesitantly wish on him:

At the same time, the FBI is sending messages to its agents nationwide seeking volunteers to temporarily transfer to Minneapolis. It wasn’t immediately clear what the FBI would ask agents who volunteered to travel to Minneapolis to do.

The FBI already has a pretty big building in Minneapolis. Yep, that’s all theirs and I know because last December, I spent three days in the hotel facing it while visiting my family.

Bringing in more FBI agents may fill those officers a bit more, but it won’t make Minneapolis any less of the FOAD monster it has morphed into in response to a vengeful federal invasion.

Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, has pledged to send out National Guard troops to protect Minnesotans and their rights. The federal government, on the other hand, has only promised to send out more guys with guns to protect the government.

“We have to send more officers and agents just to protect our officers to carry out their mission,” ICE Director Todd Lyons said on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures. “The majority of those are there to protect the men and women who are already there. Now we need 10-15 officers per arrest to protect each other” against protesters.

If you cowards can’t arrest someone when faced with the combined forces of whistles and GTFO shouts without assembling half a platoon, you’re definitely in the wrong business. If you think sending more officers and actual military troops will keep Minneapolis residents from making it hard for you to be as racist as you want to be… well, just look at the response you provoked after murdering someone just because she made it clear she wasn’t intimidated by you.

Trump wants a war. But he’s not smart enough to choose his battles. Unless he’s got the willpower to push past the few guardrails keeping him in check, he’s going to be America’s next Custer — a man so secure in his white-makes-right philosophy that he won’t recognize that he’s in over his head until it’s far too late.

And the analogy fits: they’re both prime examples of the “meritocracy” a bunch of lesser failures claim makes this country great. On one hand, we have a thrice-divorced “deal maker” who’s more famous for his bankruptcies than his business successes. On the other hand, we have Custer, who’s absolutely the mold they cast MAGA from:

Custer graduated in 1861 from the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, last in his class. 

Not only last in his class, but last in his class of only 34. Most West Point classes exceeded 100 cadets, but with the Civil War an ongoing concern, many of Custer’s betters had already volunteered to serve, rather than (lol) compete with Custer for the worst grades.

Bring it on, losers. The Midwest will fuck you up in ways you New York elites (yes, that’s you, Trump) can’t even imagine.

Filed Under: 3rd amendment, bitchassness, defense department, ice, martial law, minnesota, pete hegseth, trump administration

The Real Reason For Boat Strike ‘Double Taps’ Is Preventing Survivors From Challenging Extrajudicial Killings In Court

from the all-ghouls-all-the-time dept

The Trump Administration’s murder-in-international-waters program debuted far ahead of its legal rationale. Many people inside the administration were blindsided by this sudden escalation. Those expected to stay on top of these things — military oversight, congressional committees, etc. — found they were even further behind the curve than the late-arriving “justification” for extrajudicial killings of alleged “narco-terrorists” that used to be handled by interdiction efforts that left everyone alive and anything of value (drugs, boats, weapons) in the hands of the US government and its foreign partners.

This was something new and horrible from a regime already known for its awfulness. Even after the belated (and then hastily revised) justification was delivered by the Office of Legal Counsel, it was difficult to see how the US government could justify extrajudicial killings of alleged “terrorists” who were — at worst — simply moving narcotics from point A to point B.

The administration’s bizarre insistence that the mere existence of an international drug trade constituted a deliberate, violent attack on America was further undercut by a lot of inconvenient facts. First of all, most of those being killed had no connection to the top levels of drug cartels. They were merely mules tasked with transporting drugs. In other cases — including the one that involved a double-tap strike (which was actually four strikes) to ensure the survivors clinging to boat wreckage could no longer be referred to as “survivors” — the drugs allegedly being trafficked were headed to midpoints that suggested the narcotics were actually headed to Europe, rather than the United States.

To be clear, this administration doesn’t actually care whether or not it engages in murder or other acts of violence. What it does care about is allowing the killing to continue for as long as possible before the system of checks and balances finally gets around to dialing back the murders a bit.

A recent article from the New York Times gives the game away, even if the lede gets a bit buried. The headline mentions a White House “scramble” to “deal with” people who survived initial extrajudicial killing attempts. In one case, two survivors were rescued by the US military after failing to die during the initial strike. The White House said they should be sent to El Salvador’s torture prison. The State Department — currently headed by Marco Rubio — said this simply wasn’t possible. Both survivors ended up being sent back to their countries of origin.

Two weeks later, another murder attempt failed to murder everyone on the boat, leading to another hasty conference call between the White House, career diplomats, and Defense Department leadership. The ultimate goal was to get rid of these people as quickly as possible, which necessarily involved hasty arrangements made with government officials in their home countries.

The real reason for these hasty talks — and the secrecy surrounding them — is this: The administration definitely doesn’t seem confident that it’s fully justified in ordering military members to engage in actual war crimes; specifically, the murder of people military bylaws make clear they are supposed to be rescuing.

The two attacks discussed above happened nearly two months after the double-tap boat strike that definitely looks like a war crime. But the Trump administration definitely isn’t going to bring back survivors to face justice by charging them and giving them their day in court. If it does that, it might lose everything it likes about murdering people in international waters.

Legal cases in the United States involving survivors would force the administration to present more information to try to back up its rationale for the attacks.

[…]

“From the administration’s point of view, there are good reasons to be averse to bringing survivors to Guantánamo Bay or to the continental United States,” [former State Dept. lawyer Brian Finucane] said.

If the U.S. military brings the survivors to the Navy-run prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, lawyers defending them could file a habeas corpus lawsuit in U.S. federal court questioning whether there really is an armed conflict, for legal purposes, between the United States and cartels. Congress has not authorized the United States to engage in any such conflict.

To use the ever-popular poker parlance, that’s an obvious “tell” — something that indicates the administration has very little confidence in the legal rationale for these extrajudicial killings. If it thought it’s arguments had a very good chance of holding up in court, it wouldn’t be hastily returning “narco-terrorists” to their home countries as quickly and quietly as possible, where they’ll presumably immediately resume their “narco-terrorism.”

That’s also why the first double-tap strike occurred only days into Trump’s undeclared war on alleged drug boats. As far as we know, this hasn’t been repeated, despite everyone who hasn’t already resigned from the Defense Department (or been thrown under the bus by those whose positions are unassailable thanks to their deference to Trump) claiming either ignorance of the double-strike or saying lots of stuff about “saving” the country from being murdered by inanimate fentanyl (or whatever).

Any survivor is just another chance to prove the US government wrong. And if it isn’t immediately clear survivors have somewhere to be hastily dumped, you can probably assume the military will resort to Plan B: mob-style “hits” to make sure these witnesses can’t talk.

Filed Under: boat strikes, crimes against humanity, defense department, doj, donald trump, extrajudicial killings, frank bradley, marco rubio, mass deportation, murder, pete hegseth, trump administration, venezuela, war on drugs