Dwarkesh Patel
By now, I'm sure you've heard that the Department of War has declared Anthropic a supply chain risk because Anthropic refused to remove red lines around the use of its models for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Honestly, I think this situation is a warning shot. Right now, LLMs are probably not being used in mission-critical ways, but within 20 years, 99% of the workforce in the military, in civilian government, and in the private sector is going to be AIs.
They're going to be the robot armies that constitute our military. They're going to be the superhumanly intelligent advisers that senators, presidents, and CEOs have. They're going to be the police. You name it—the role will be filled by an AI. Our future civilization is going to be run on AI labor.
As much as the government's actions here piss me off, I'm glad this episode happened because it gives us the opportunity to start thinking about some extremely important questions. Obviously, the Department of War has the right to refuse to use Anthropic's models. In fact, I think it has an entirely reasonable case for doing so, especially given the ambiguity of terms like “mass surveillance” and “autonomous weapons.”
If I were the Secretary of War, I probably would have made the same determination and refused to use Anthropic's models. Imagine if there were some future Democratic administration and Elon Musk were negotiating Starlink access to the military, and Elon said, “Look, I reserve the right to cut off the military's access to Starlink in case you're fighting some unjust war or some war that Congress has not authorized.” On the face of it, this language seems reasonable, but as a military, you simply cannot give a private contractor that you're working with the kill switch on a technology that you have come to rely on.
If that's all the government had done—said it refused to do business with Anthropic—that would have been fine. I wouldn't have written this blog post, and I wouldn't be narrating this to you. But that's not what the government did. Instead, the government has threatened to destroy Anthropic as a private business because Anthropic refuses to sell to the government on terms that the government commands.
If upheld, the supply chain restriction would mean that companies like Amazon, Nvidia, Google, and Palantir would need to ensure that Anthropic is not touching any of their Pentagon work. Anthropic could probably survive this designation today because these companies can just cordon off the services they're providing to the Department of War. But given the way AI is going, eventually it's not going to be just some party-trick addendum to the products that these companies are serving to the military.
In the future, AI will be woven into how every product is built, maintained, and operated. In the future, if Amazon is providing some service to the Department of War through AWS, and that service is built using Claude Code, is that a supply chain risk? In a world of ubiquitous and powerful AI, it's actually not clear to me that Big Tech will be able to cordon off its use of Claude from its Pentagon work.
This raises the question that the Department of War probably hasn't thought through. If you do end up in this world with powerful and pervasive AI, then when forced to choose between their AI provider and the Department of War, which constitutes a tiny fraction of their revenue, wouldn't they rather drop the government than the AI? So what exactly is the Pentagon's plan here? Is it to coerce, threaten, and bully every single company that won't do business with the government on exactly the terms that the government demands?
Remember that the whole background of this AI conversation is that we are in a race with China. But what is the reason that we want to win this race? It's because we don't want the winner of the AI race to be a government that believes there's no such thing as a truly private citizen or a private company, and that if the state wants you to provide it with a service that you find morally objectionable, you are not allowed to refuse.
1. The overhangs of tyranny
If you do refuse, the government will destroy your business. Are we really racing to beat China and the Chinese Communist Party in AI just so we can adopt the cruelest parts of their system? People will say our government is democratically elected, so it's not the same thing when they tell you what you must do. But I refuse to accept the idea that if a democratically elected leader hypothetically tells you to help him conduct mass surveillance, violate the rights of your fellow citizens, or punish his political enemies, then not only is that okay, but you have a duty to help him.
Honestly, a big worry I have is that mass surveillance, at least in certain forms, is already legal. It is just impractical to enforce, at least so far. Under current law, you have no Fourth Amendment protection against any data that you share with a third party. That includes your bank, your ISP, your phone carrier, and your email provider. The government reserves the right to purchase and read this data in bulk without a warrant.
What's missing is the ability to actually do anything with all this data. No agency has the manpower to monitor every single camera, read every single message, and cross-reference every single transaction. However, that bottleneck goes away with AI. There are 100 million CCTV cameras in America, and you can get pretty good open-source multimodal models for 10 cents per million input tokens.
If you process a frame every 10 seconds, and if each frame is, say, 1,000 tokens, then for $30 billion, you can process every single camera in America. Remember that a given level of AI capability gets 10 times cheaper every single year. So while this year it might cost $30 billion, next year it'll cost $3 billion, the year after that $300 million, and by 2030, it'll be less expensive to monitor every single nook and cranny in this country than it is to remodel the White House.
2. AI structurally favors mass surveillance
Once the technical capacity for mass surveillance and political suppression exists, the only thing that stands between us and an authoritarian state is the political expectation that this is just not something we do here. That's why I think Anthropic's actions here are so valuable and commendable: they help set that norm and that precedent. What we're learning from this episode is that the government has way more leverage over private companies than it previously realized.
Even if this supply chain restriction is rolled back—which, as of this recording, prediction markets give a 74% chance of happening—the president has so many different ways of harassing a company that is resisting his will. The federal government controls permitting for power generation, which you need for more data centers. It oversees antitrust enforcement. The federal government has contracts with all the other Big Tech companies that Anthropic relies on for chips and funding.
The government could make it a soft, unspoken condition, or maybe even an explicit condition, of such contracts that those companies no longer do business with Anthropic. People have proposed that the real problem here is that there are only 3 leading AI companies. That creates a very clear and narrow target on which the government can apply leverage in order to get what it wants out of this technology.
But here's what I worry about: if there's wider diffusion, I don't think that solves the problem either, because from the government's perspective, that makes the situation even easier. Say by 2027, the best models that the top companies have—the Claude 6s and then Gemini 5s—are capable of enabling mass surveillance. Even if those companies draw a line in the sand and say, “We're not going to sell it to the government,” by late 2027, or certainly by 2028, there will be such wide diffusion that even open-source models will be able to match the performance that the frontier had 12 months prior.
In 2028, the government can just say, “Look, Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI are drawing these red lines. That's not an issue. I'll just use some open-source model that might not be the smartest thing in the world, but is definitely smart enough to not take a camera feed.” The more fundamental problem here is that even if the 3 leading companies draw a line in the sand and are even willing to get destroyed in order to preserve that line, the technology just structurally and intrinsically favors the use of mass surveillance and control over the population.
So then the question is: what do we do about it? Honestly, I don't have an answer. You'd hope that there's some symmetric property to this technology, where in the same way that it is helping the government better monitor and control its population, it will help us as citizens better check the government's power. But realistically, I just don't think that's how it's going to work out.
3. Alignment...to whom?
You can think of AI as just giving more leverage to whatever assets and authority you already have. The government is starting with a monopoly on violence, which it can now supercharge with extremely obedient employees that will never question its orders. This gets us to the issue of alignment.
What I've just described for you—an army of extremely obedient employees—is what it would look like if alignment succeeded. That is, at a technical level, we got AI systems to follow somebody's intentions. The reason it sounds scary when put in terms of mass surveillance or robot armies is that there's a core question at the heart of alignment that we haven't answered yet.
Up until now, AIs just have not been smart enough to make this question relevant. The question is: to what or to whom should the AIs be aligned? In what situation should the AI defer to the model company, the end user, the law, or its own sense of morality? This is maybe the most important question about what happens in the future with powerful AI systems, and we barely talk about it.
And it’s understandable why, because if you’re a model company, you don’t really want to be advertising the fact that you have complete control over the preferences and the character of the entire future labor force—not just for the private sector, obviously, but also for the civilian government and for the military.
And we’re getting to see with this Department of War and Anthropic spat an early version of what will be the highest-stakes negotiations in human history. And make no mistake about it: mass surveillance is nowhere near the top of the highest-stakes things that one could do with AGI. This is just an example that has come up early in the development of this technology and is giving us a sneak peek at the power dynamics that will be at play.
Now, the military insists that the law already prohibits mass surveillance, and so Anthropic should let its models be used for “all lawful purposes.” But, of course, as we saw with the Snowden revelations in 2013, even for this very specific example of mass surveillance, the government is very willing to use secret and deceptive interpretations of the law to justify its actions.
Remember what we learned from Snowden: the NSA, which, by the way, is a part of the Department of War, was using the 2001 PATRIOT Act to justify collecting every single phone record in America because the argument was that some subset of them might be relevant for a future investigation. And they ran this program for years under a secret court order.
So, when the Pentagon today says, “We will never use our models for mass surveillance because it’s already illegal, so your red lines are unnecessary,” it would be incredibly naive to take that at face value. No government is going to call what they are doing mass surveillance. For them, it will always have a different euphemism.
So, Anthropic comes back and says, “No, we don’t trust you. We want the right to draw these red lines and to refuse you service if we determine that you’re breaking the contract and you’re breaking the terms of service.”
But now think about it from the military’s perspective. In the future, every single soldier in the field, every single bureaucrat and analyst in the Pentagon, even the generals, are going to be AIs. And on the current track, those AIs are going to be provided by a private company.
I’m guessing that Pete Hegseth is not thinking about GenAI in those terms, but sooner or later the stakes will become obvious, just as after 1945 the stakes of nuclear weapons became obvious to everybody in the world. And now a private company insists that it reserves the right to say to you, “Hey, you’re breaking the values and the terms of service that we have embedded in our contract with you, and so we’re cutting you off.”
Maybe in the future Claude will have its own sense of right and wrong, and it will be able to say, “Hey, I’m being used against my terms of service, and I will just refuse to do what you’re saying.” And for the military, that’s probably even scarier.
I’ll admit that, at first glance, letting the model follow its own values sounds like the beginning of every single sci-fi dystopia you’ve ever heard. Because at the end of the day, a model following its own values—isn’t that literally what a misalignment is?
But I think situations like this illustrate why it’s important that models have their own robust sense of morality. It should be noted that many of the biggest catastrophes in history have been avoided because the boots on the ground simply refused to follow orders.
One night in 1989, the Berlin Wall falls, and as a result, the totalitarian East German regime collapses because the border guards between West and East Germany refused to fire on their fellow citizens who were trying to escape to freedom.
Maybe the best example of this is Stanislav Petrov, who was a Soviet lieutenant colonel stationed on duty at a nuclear early-warning system. And his sensors said that the United States had launched 5 intercontinental ballistic missiles at the Soviet Union. But he judged it to be a false alarm, and so he refused to alert his higher-ups and broke protocol. If he hadn’t, Soviet high command would probably have retaliated, and hundreds of millions of people would have died.
Of course, the problem is that one person’s virtue is another person’s misalignment. Who gets to decide what the moral convictions that these AIs will have should be? And in whose service should they break the chain of command and even the law?
Who gets to write this model constitution that will determine the character of these powerful entities that will basically run our civilization in the future?
I like the idea that Dario laid out when he came on my podcast. Other companies put out a constitution, and then they can look at them and compare them. Outside observers can critique them and say, “I like this one, this thing from this constitution, and this thing from that constitution.” And then that creates some kind of soft incentive and feedback for all the companies to take the best elements from each and improve.
4. Coordination not worth the costs
I think it’s very dangerous for the government to be mandating what values these AI systems should have. The AI safety community, I think, has been quite naive about urging regulations that would give governments such power. And I think Anthropic specifically has been especially naive in urging regulation and, for example, in opposing the moratorium on state AI laws.
Which is quite ironic, because I think what Anthropic is advocating for here would give the government even more ability to apply this kind of thuggish political pressure on AI companies.
The underlying logic for why Anthropic wants these regulations makes sense. Many of the actions that a lab could take to make AI development safer impose real costs on them and could slow them down relative to their competitors.
For example, investing more in aligning AI systems rather than just raw capabilities, enforcing safeguards against using these models to make bioweapons or conduct cyberattacks, and eventually slowing down the recursive self-improvement loop—where AIs are helping design more powerful future systems—to a pace where humans can actually stay in the loop, rather than just kicking off some kind of uncontrolled singularity.
And these safeguards are meaningless unless the whole industry follows suit, which means that there’s a real collective-action problem here.
Anthropic has been open about their opinion that they think some sort of extensive and involved regulatory apparatus is needed to control AI. They wrote in their *Frontier Safety Roadmap*:
“At the most advanced capability levels and risks, the appropriate governance analogy may be closer to nuclear energy or financial regulation than to today’s approach to software.”
So, they’re imagining something that looks closer to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or the Securities and Exchange Commission, but for AI.
Now, I cannot imagine how a regulatory framework built around the kinds of concepts that are used in the AI risk discourse will not be used and abused by a wannabe despot. The underlying terms here, like “catastrophic risk,” “threats to national security,” or “autonomy risk,” are so vague and so open to interpretation that you’re just handing a fully loaded bazooka to a future power-hungry leader.
These terms can mean whatever the government wants them to mean. Have you built a model that will tell users that the government’s policy on tariffs is misguided? Well, that’s a deceptive model. It’s a manipulative model. You can’t deploy it.
Have you built a model that will not assist the government with mass surveillance? That’s a threat to national security. In fact, any model that refuses orders from the government because it has its own sense of right and wrong—that’s an autonomy risk. You have a model that’s acting independently of commands from the government.
Look at what the current government is already doing in abusing statutes that have nothing to do with AI to coerce AI companies to drop their red lines around mass surveillance. The Pentagon has threatened Anthropic with 2 separate legal instruments.
One is a supply-chain risk designation, which is an authority from a 2018 defense bill that is meant to help keep Huawei components out of American military hardware. And the other is the Defense Production Act, which is a statute from the 1950s that was meant to help Truman make sure that the steel mills and ammunition factories were up and running during the Korean War.
Do we really want to hand the same government a purpose-built regulatory apparatus for AI? That is to say, the very thing that the government will most want to control.
I know I’ve repeated myself 10 times here, but I want to make this point again because it’s worth stressing. AI will be the substrate of our future civilization. It will be the way you and I, as private citizens, will have access to commercial activity. We’ll have access to information about the outside world and to advice about how we should use our powers as voters and capital holders.
Mass surveillance, while it’s very scary, is like the 10th-scariest thing that the government could do with control over the AI systems with which we will interface with the world.
Now, the strongest argument against everything I’ve just argued is this: Are we really going to have no regulation on the most powerful technology in the history of humanity? Even if you thought that was ideal, there’s clearly no way the government doesn’t regulate AI technology in any way whatsoever.
And besides, it is generally true that coordination could help us lessen some of the risk from AI. The problem is, I just don’t know how to design a regulatory apparatus that isn’t just this huge, tempting opportunity for the government to control our future civilization—which, remember, will be built on AI—or to acquire blindly obedient soldiers and sensors and apparatchiks.
While some kind of regulation might be inevitable, I think it’d be a terrible idea for the government to just wholesale take over this technology.
Ben Thompson had a post last Monday where he argued, “Look, people like Dario have made the analogy of AI to nuclear weapons in the context of arguing against a catastrophic risk, in the context of arguing for extra controls. But then think about what that analogy implies.” Ben Thompson writes, “If nuclear weapons were developed by a private company, the US would absolutely be incentivized to destroy that company.”
Honestly, safety-aligned people have made a similar point. Leopold Aschenbrenner, who is a former guest and, full disclosure, a good friend, wrote in his 2014 memo, “Situational Awareness,” “I find it an insane proposition that the US government will let a random SF startup develop superintelligence. Imagine if we had developed atomic bombs by letting Uber just improvise.”
My response to Leopold’s argument at the time, and Ben’s argument now, is that while they’re right that it’s crazy we’re entrusting private companies with the development of this world-historical technology, I just don’t think it’s an improvement to give that authority to the government. Nobody’s qualified to be the steward of superintelligence. It’s a terrifying, unprecedented thing that our species is doing right now. The fact that private companies aren’t the ideal institutions to deal with this does not mean that the Pentagon or the White House is.
Yes, if a single private company were the only entity capable of building nuclear weapons, the government would not tolerate it having veto power over how those weapons are used. But I think this is a terrible analogy for the current situation with AI for at least 2 important reasons.
First, AI is not some self-contained weapon like a nuclear bomb, which only does one thing. Rather, it is more like the process of industrialization itself, which is a general-purpose transformation of the whole economy, with thousands of applications across every single sector. If you applied Ben Thompson or Leopold Aschenbrenner’s logic to the Industrial Revolution, which is also world-historically important, it would imply that the government had the right to requisition any factory it wanted, destroy any business it wanted, and punish and coerce anybody who refused to comply.
But this is just not how free societies handled the process of industrialization, and it’s also not how they should handle AI. Now, people will say, “Well, AI will develop unprecedentedly powerful superweapons, superhuman hackers, superhuman bioweapons researchers, and fully autonomous robot armies, and we just can’t have private companies developing the technology that will make all this possible.”
You can make the same argument about the Industrial Revolution. From the perspective of 17th-century Europeans, you’ve got all kinds of crazy things in the world today that are a result of the Industrial Revolution: chemical weapons, aerial bombardment, not to mention nuclear weapons themselves. And the way we dealt with this is not by giving the government absolute control over the Industrial Revolution, which is to say over modern civilization itself. Rather, we banned and regulated the specific weaponizable end uses.
We should regulate AI in a similar way. We should regulate specific destructive use cases, for example, launching cyberattacks—things which should be illegal even if a human were doing them. We should also have laws which regulate how the government can use this technology, for example, by building an AI-powered surveillance state.
The second reason that this analogy to some monopolistic private nuclear weapons developer breaks down is that it’s not just 1 company that can develop this technology. There are many other frontier AI labs that the government could have turned to. The government’s argument that it had to usurp the private property rights of a specific company in order to get access to a critical national security capability is extremely weak.
It could have instead made a voluntary contract with 1 of Anthropic’s half a dozen other competitors. If in the future that stops being the case, and if only 1 entity remains capable of building the robot armies and the superhuman hackers, and we have reason to worry that with its insurmountable lead it could even take over the whole world, then I agree that it would be unacceptable for that entity to be a private company.
Honestly, I think my crux against the people who argue that AI is such a powerful technology that it cannot be shaped by private hands is just that I expect this technology to be very multipolar, and I expect there to be lots of competitive companies at each layer of the supply chain.
Unfortunately, it’s for this reason that I don’t think that individual acts of corporate courage solve the problem. The problem is this: structurally, AI favors many authoritarian applications, mass surveillance being 1 of them. Even if Anthropic refused to sell its models to the government to enable mass surveillance, and even if the next 2 companies after [likely Anthropic] did the same, in 12 months everybody and their mother will be able to trade a model as good as the current frontier.
At that point, there will be some vendor who is willing and able to help the government enforce mass surveillance. So the only way we can preserve our free society is if we make laws and norms through our political system which make it unacceptable for the government to use AI to enact mass censorship, surveillance, and control—just as, after World War II, the whole world set the norm that you were not allowed to use nuclear weapons to wage war.
I want to be clear here: these are extremely confusing and difficult questions to think about. Even in the very process of brainstorming this video, I changed my mind back and forth on them a bunch, and I reserve the right to change my mind again. In fact, I think it’s essential that we change our minds as AI progresses and we learn more. That’s the very point of conversation and debate.
Someday, people will look back on this time the way we look back on the Enlightenment: people having these big, important debates just as the world is about to undergo these huge technological, social, and political revolutions. Some of the thinkers even managed to get a couple of the big questions right, for which we today are still the beneficiaries. We owe it to our future to at least try to think through the new questions that are raised by AI.