Under Secretary Emil Michael addresses Anthropic's ethical red lines during defense contract negotiations with the Pentagon.
Opinion
Michael: AI vendors restricting kinetic use pose legitimate military supply chain risks
“If Lockheed Martin builds a weapon for me, and they're using, ah, a technology to help them do some of these science-oriented things, physics, aerodynamics, and so on, and the vendor has expressed an unwillingness to want that to be part of the use case, well,…”
Insight
Michael: AI labs' apocalyptic rhetoric justifies strict Pentagon scrutiny of management
“So these companies are talking about their things in apocalyptic terms, which make it necessary for us to judge the management teams, judge their actions,
Look at the terms of service.
Understand how they fit in our supply chain.
This technology is like nothin…”
Prediction Open · timeframe Apr 2029
Michael: Anthropic's First Amendment retaliation claim against Pentagon will fail
“I think the notion that a First Amendment claim is going to hold up is, is, would be shocking, because that means that the government has no choice to make.”
Insight
Michael: AI enables drone threat discrimination far beyond human capacity
“You could do much more, be more precise, be more specific about what you're going after, what you're defending how you know, and the precision is really what's interesting to me because if you can use AI to detect and discriminate and, by discriminate, I mean,…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Michael: AI targeting tools keep identical rules of engagement and approvals
“It's, you have the same rules of engagement, the same approval system. What you now have is better aggregation and synthesis of the data that you would already use to make that decision.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Michael: Operational speed prevented U.S. casualties in Venezuela operation
“Look what happened in Venezuela. The speed at which that execution of that operation happened meant that we didn't have any casualties on our side.”