- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- politics@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43810526
Actions by the president and the Pentagon appeared to drive a wedge between Washington and the tech industry, whose leaders and workers spoke out for the start-up.
Feb. 27, 2026
Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, said in a memo to employees this week that “we have long believed that A.I. should not be used for mass surveillance or autonomous lethal weapons.”
More than 100 employees at Google signed a petition calling on the tech giant to “refuse to comply” with the Pentagon on some uses of artificial intelligence in military operations.
And employees at Amazon, Google and Microsoft urged their leaders in a separate open letter on Thursday to “hold the line” against the Pentagon.
Silicon Valley has rallied behind the A.I. start-up Anthropic, which has been embroiled in a dispute with President Trump and the Pentagon over how its technology may be used for military purposes. Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, has said he does not want the company’s A.I. to be used to surveil Americans or in autonomous weapons, saying this could “undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.”
These companies are signaling their virtues for PR purposes, but it won’t change much. There are still permissively licensed open weight models and nothing is stopping governments from training their own specialized models. Given the surveillance the NSA already is known to have, for example, there clearly is no shortage of technologists who are willing to work on shitty things. The NSA and other 3-letter agencies are likely already using LLMs for surveillance and there are likely already LLM powered killing machines. Human-piloted drones have already been committing war crimes with impunity for quite some time, so not sure much LLMs will fundamentally change the situation.