The NSA appeared to capture and store everything they could, but they only considered it domestic spying if they queried that stored information
So it would be deeply surprising to me, based on past evidence, for the military not to be spying on US citizens in every possible way, using every tool at their disposal, and recording that information in bulk. They might have some procedural safeguards against looking at that information unless certain keywords appeared, or unless DoD leadership gave orders to spy on someone, or unless an LLM flagged some person as meeting certain criteria ordered by (say) Hegseth. But massive data collection on US citizens (and lying about it) have both long been part of the US military’s standard operating procedure.
That could easily have been a point of contention, if (for example) the Pentagon were using Claude to build dossiers on American citizens (without a human being involved), and then to flag dossiers that met certain characteristics.
As for fully autonomous AI weapon programs, I recall that Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency requested researchers to work on fully automous “paintball” robots as early as the late 90s. (Source: I knew the researchers personally.) Military brass has always been skeptical of deploying this capability, because basically nobody wants US soldiers standing next to a hallucinating Terminator. But they’ve wanted to develop it.
So one of Anthropic’s red lines is something that the NSA has routinely crossed at massive scale (if you ignore their distinction about capturing and durable recording information versus having a human look at it). And the other red line is something that the military has been trying to prototype for over 30 years, to my personal knowledge.
So I think there’s a good chance that, despite Hegseth’s claims, Anthropic’s actual red lines would have prevented the DoD from doing things that they wanted to do.
This is a possibility.
However, keep in mind that the National Security Agency is part of the DOD. And although the NSA is technically forbidden from spying on Americans:
The NSA has previously lied to Congressional oversight committees and the public about bulk domestic surveillance programs, although arguably the oversight committee knew that the NSA was lying to the public
The NSA appeared to capture and store everything they could, but they only considered it domestic spying if they queried that stored information
So it would be deeply surprising to me, based on past evidence, for the military not to be spying on US citizens in every possible way, using every tool at their disposal, and recording that information in bulk. They might have some procedural safeguards against looking at that information unless certain keywords appeared, or unless DoD leadership gave orders to spy on someone, or unless an LLM flagged some person as meeting certain criteria ordered by (say) Hegseth. But massive data collection on US citizens (and lying about it) have both long been part of the US military’s standard operating procedure.
That could easily have been a point of contention, if (for example) the Pentagon were using Claude to build dossiers on American citizens (without a human being involved), and then to flag dossiers that met certain characteristics.
As for fully autonomous AI weapon programs, I recall that Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency requested researchers to work on fully automous “paintball” robots as early as the late 90s. (Source: I knew the researchers personally.) Military brass has always been skeptical of deploying this capability, because basically nobody wants US soldiers standing next to a hallucinating Terminator. But they’ve wanted to develop it.
So one of Anthropic’s red lines is something that the NSA has routinely crossed at massive scale (if you ignore their distinction about capturing and durable recording information versus having a human look at it). And the other red line is something that the military has been trying to prototype for over 30 years, to my personal knowledge.
So I think there’s a good chance that, despite Hegseth’s claims, Anthropic’s actual red lines would have prevented the DoD from doing things that they wanted to do.