alt Hacker News> We hope our leaders 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 for domestic mass surveillance and autonomously killing people without human oversight.
This is a trap. Two, I guess, but let's take the first one:
Domestic mass surveillance. Domestic.
Remember the eyes agreements: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/are-the-eyes-agreements-abo...
Expanding:
> These pacts enable member countries to share signals intelligence (SIGINT), including surveillance data gathered globally. Disclosures, notably from Edward Snowden in 2013, revealed that allies intentionally collect data on each other's citizens - bypassing domestic restrictions like the US ban on NSA spying on Americans - then exchange it.
Banning domestic mass surveillance is irrelevant.
The eyes-agreements allow them (respective participating countries) to share data with each other. Every country spies on every other country, with every country telling every other country what they have gathered.
This renders laws, which are preventing The State from spying on its own citizens, as irrelevant. They serve the purpose of being evidence of mass manipulation.
Replies
It is relevant. Anthropic would have argued the US military could not use its tools to process data gathered by foreign agencies when it applied to US citizens or soil.
So there you have it
> We hope
No. Hope is not a strategy. Too much of the techno optimist future narratives we use to coat over the increasingly screaming cognitive dissonance as we see what keeps us civil, from each other's throats, decline, smothered by the rise of the broligarchy.
What's happening here is not about AI. It's a loyalty test, administered to every major actor in the economy, the more influential, the more ruthless and earlier.
Your core values, in exchange for taxpayer money access and loyalty to the Don, an offer few can refuse.
And the choice will come for everyone. It's a distillation attack to filter the
- DEI for Grants - Your officer's oath to not kill civilians by word of your leader for continued career - AI Safety for non blacklisting - Your immigirant employee's location for us not harassing your offices in person - Your trans neighbour shipped to a reeducation camp and gender reassignment for the safety of your family.
Becoming complicit is the ultimate loyalty
So stop hope. Stop asking. Demand, Force, Resist.
``` Do not go gentle into that long night, The righteous should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light ```
The point that I've not seen someone making: do you even need LLMs for domestic surveillance? I can grab a copy of EmbeddingGemma or Qwen3-embedding or a similar model and do semantic clustering of existing data, since the "retrieval" is the most important part for such applications, not its integration into a LLM.
if it doesn't matter, why is the DoD pushing for it?
The citation for your quote appears to be an unsourced Reddit post.
The agreement at the heart of 5 Eyes is to not surveil the other nations - this must be up there for most persistently misunderstood fact among techies (probably why AI spits it out)
There's obviously gaps in domestic mass surveillance they've gotten from allies or else they wouldn't care so much about using Anthropic for it.
That's always been the loophole. But it involved an extra step so they are just trying to get rid of that one annoyance.
Here is an interesting thing to think about which country spies on Americans the most and how? Are there New Zealand commandos sneaking around the shores tapping cables? Moles working in the AT&T for the Canadian government? What happens if one of those individuals get caught, are they quietly allowed to leave, and if they commit any crimes do the charges get erased magically? Otherwise, if that doesn't happen there is danger they'll grab our spies in their countries in turn. Or they just blatantly pass lists around of who works for whom so they don't interfere with each other as that would preclude getting the data back through the loop to the NSA.
There is of course another loophole and that is private entities collecting data. The Constitution doesn't say anything about that, so the government figures it's fare game if they just pay a company to collect the data and then they query later. They didn't collect it so it's not "spying".
Despite this comment focusing on "domestic", because it highlights workarounds I read it as reinforcing the tone-deaf implication in the letter that using the models to spy on non-Americans is ok.
You all want to feel safe just because you are a US citizen but this is a mass surveillance technology on global level. It’s nothing like some secret agent spying on a KGB asset in Berlin like in the old days. We are writing on HN, are we on American soil? Not really. No one asked me for passport. This is not a “domestic” space. Everything here can be automatically and legally spied on. And this applies to everything digital. Spy bots don’t have the concept of “domestic” or any way to identify citizenship. And if Google or TikTok can spy on you, your government and ChatGPT/Grok’s agentic secret agents can definitely spy on you. I’m sure they have better loopholes than the Eyes thing, if they really need one.