What the Anthropic/OpenAI Story Is Really About

​The media reported on the drama of the Pentagon’s AI contracts as a horse race: Anthropic tried to limit what the War Department could do with the company's Claude AI product. The administration subsequently rescinded all government contracts with the company. OpenAI offered its products as the alternative and won the day.

But beneath this drama lies a deeper and more dangerous reality: In the absence of meaningful guardrails, the AI tech of any company can be used for surveillance and – if combined with data collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) – could allow government employees across the federal bureaucracy to run searches on Americans’ private communications.

Such AI-powered surveillance could extend far beyond the Department of War’s use cases and even the Justice Department’s FBI investigations. Government AI-enabled mass surveillance of the domestic population would:

• Not be subject to any oversight authority – constitutional or statutory

 

• Not be encumbered by recent reforms like 2024 RISAA (Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act)

 

• Be supercharged by the dismantling of long-standing information silos and the removal of safeguards that once limited the sharing of Americans’ private data between agencies – from the Department of Homeland Security to the IRS.

 

• All done without a warrant – without any court supervision of the government’s invasion of your privacy.

The danger of AI surveillance in a government that shares data between agencies should prompt Congress to strengthen Fourth Amendment privacy protections. With such a vast datascape available to the world's most powerful government – where many existing restrictions have already been weakened – we otherwise risk the irrevocable loss of personal privacy and the rise of a permanent surveillance state.

We need to come to terms with the fact that AI tech makes rummaging through our private lives and personal histories easier and faster than anyone could have imagined even a few years ago. Americans’ communications could become permanently accessible to the prying eyes of government agents in almost any agency with a whim (or a political directive) to pursue.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. AI was supposed to have guardrails, as was Section 702, enacted by Congress to enable the surveillance of foreign threats on foreign soil, but has instead been used by the government to search the private communications of Americans without a warrant.

RISAA was a noble attempt to rein in the misuse of Section 702 as a domestic spy tool. Its reforms included oversight and restrictions on FBI searches involving people inside the United States. It implemented rules for queries involving high-profile groups or individuals. It established training and accountability measures, while enhancing oversight of the two secret courts FISA created.
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These were important reforms, but they were weakened by last-minute changes to the bill. When Section 702 comes up for renewal next month – this time in the context of an AI juggernaut – it may well be our last chance to protect our freedoms while protecting national security. 

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