Deadline Day for Autonomous AI Weapons & Mass Surveillance

Would you want your government to have fully autonomous AI weapons in drone or humanoid form such that for example AI agents could make lethal decisions without a human in the loop? What if you thought that that was the only way for your country to maintain the ability to project power around the world? And would you want your government to be able to conduct mass intelligence surveillance which could reduce both crime and privacy? If you wouldn't, by the way, but think it's inevitable anyway that all of that's coming, would you at least want those who make such tools to try to stop those end states coming about?

Today is Friday the 27th of February, 2026, and that's the deadline day for Anthropic, makers of the Clawude series of AI models, to acquies to the US Department of War demands for almost unfettered use of those clawed models. I say almost unfettered because the use of those models by the Pentagon would still have to be quote lawful. But as we'll see, that allows for autonomous killbots and mass domestic surveillance on Americans. And there are other strands of this story that are developing as you watch this as I'm recording even because a petition by OpenAI and Google employees has doubled in size since just this morning declaring their support for anthropic stance.

You can see that it's got about 340 signatures from those two companies and I bet if I refresh it will be higher. Yes, I just refreshed and in the last few minutes that has gone up. The statement that these employees are signing up to is asking that their leaders Sundar Pachai and Samman will put aside their differences and stand together to continue to refuse the Department of War's current demands for permission to use our models Gemini Chibbt for domestic mass surveillance and autonomously killing people without human oversight. Reporting from Politico indicates that those two companies are only close to agreeing the terms, so they are not yet fully on board either.

While XAI is complying with the Pentagon. Here, by the way, is what one Pentagon spokesman said. Under Secretary of War Emil Michael said that it's a shame that Dario Ammed, the CEO of Anthropic, is a liar and has a god complex. He wants nothing more than to try to personally control the US military.

He's ...