{"id":19164,"date":"2026-03-06T19:43:15","date_gmt":"2026-03-06T19:43:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/06\/is-the-pentagon-allowed-to-surveil-americans-with-ai\/"},"modified":"2026-03-06T19:43:15","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T19:43:15","slug":"is-the-pentagon-allowed-to-surveil-americans-with-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/06\/is-the-pentagon-allowed-to-surveil-americans-with-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the Pentagon allowed to surveil Americans with AI?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The ongoing public feud between the Department of Defense and AI company Anthropic over its technology has raised a deep open question: does the law actually allow the US government to conduct mass surveillance on Americans?<\/p>\n

Surprisingly, the answer is not straightforward. More than a decade after Edward Snowden exposed the NSA\u2019s collection of bulk metadata from the phones of Americans, the US is still navigating a gap between what ordinary people think is surveillance and what the law allows.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The flashpoint in the standoff between Anthropic and the government was the Pentagon\u2019s desire to use Anthropic\u2019s AI Claude to analyze bulk commercial data<\/a> collected from Americans. Anthropic demanded its AI not be used for mass domestic surveillance (or for autonomous weapons, which are machines that can kill targets without human oversight). A week after negotiations broke down, the Pentagon designated Anthropic a supply chain risk<\/a>, a label typically reserved for foreign companies that pose a threat to national security.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the wake of the fallout, OpenAI, a rival AI company behind ChatGPT, sealed a deal<\/a> with the Pentagon that allowed the company\u2019s AI to be used by the Pentagon for \u201call lawful purposes<\/a>\u201d\u2014language that critics say left the door open to domestic surveillance. Over the following weekend, users uninstalled<\/a> ChatGPT in droves. Protestors chalked<\/a> messages around OpenAI\u2019s headquarters in San Francisco: \u201cWhat are your redlines\u201d?\u00a0<\/p>\n

OpenAI announced on Monday that it had reworked its deal<\/a> to make sure that the company\u2019s AI will not be used for domestic surveillance. The company added that its services will not be used by intelligence agencies, such as the NSA.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Altman suggested that existing law prohibits domestic surveillance by the Department of Defense (now sometimes called the Department of War) and that OpenAI\u2019s contract simply needed to reference it. \u201cThe DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement,\u201d he wrote<\/a> on X. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued the opposite. \u201cTo the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, this is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI,\u201d he wrote<\/a> in a policy statement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So, who is right? Does the law allow the Pentagon to surveil Americans using AI?<\/p>\n

Supercharged surveillance<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The answer depends on what we think counts as surveillance. \u201cA lot of stuff that normal people would consider a search or surveillance\u2026 is not actually considered a search or surveillance by the law,\u201d says Alan Rozenshtein, a law professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. That means public information, such as social media posts, surveillance camera footage, and voter registration records is fair game. So is information on Americans picked up incidentally from surveillance on foreign nationals.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Most notably, the government can purchase commercial data from companies, which can include sensitive personal information like mobile location and web browsing records. In recent years, agencies from ICE<\/a> and IRS<\/a> to FBI<\/a> and NSA<\/a> have increasingly tapped into this data marketplace<\/a>, fueled by an internet economy that harvests user data for advertising. These datasets can let the government access information that might not be available without a warrant or subpoena, which are normally required to obtain sensitive personal data.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a huge amount of information that the government can collect on Americans that is not itself regulated either by the Constitution, which is the Fourth Amendment, or statute,\u201d says Rozenshtein. And there aren\u2019t meaningful limits on what the government can do with all of this data.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because until the last several decades, people weren\u2019t generating massive clouds of data that opened up new possibilities for surveillance. The Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure, was written when collecting information meant entering people\u2019s homes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Subsequent laws, like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 or the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, were passed when surveillance involved wiretapping phone calls and intercepting emails. The bulk of laws governing surveillance were on the books before the internet took off. We weren\u2019t generating vast trails of online data, and the government didn\u2019t have sophisticated tools to analyze the data.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now we do, and AI supercharges what kind of surveillance can be carried out. \u201cWhat AI can do is it can take a lot of information, none of which is by itself sensitive, and therefore none of which by itself is regulated, and it can give the government a lot of powers that the government didn\u2019t have before,\u201d says Rozenshtein.\u00a0<\/p>\n

AI can aggregate individual pieces of information to spot patterns, draw inferences, and build detailed profiles of people\u2014at massive scale. And as long as the government collects the information lawfully, it can do whatever it wants with that information, including feeding it to AI systems. \u201cThe law has not caught up with technological reality,\u201d says Rozenshtein.<\/p>\n

While surveillance can raise serious privacy concerns, the Pentagon can have legitimate national security interests in collecting and analyzing data on Americans. \u201cIn order to collect information on Americans, it has to be for a very specific subset of missions,\u201d says Loren Voss, a former military intelligence officer at the Pentagon.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For example, a counterintelligence mission might require information about an American who is working for a foreign country, or plotting to engage in international terrorist activities. But targeted intelligence can sometimes stretch into collecting more data. \u201cThis kind of collection does make people nervous,\u201d says Voss.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lawful use<\/strong><\/h3>\n

OpenAI says its contract now includes language that says the company\u2019s AI system \u201cshall not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of U.S. persons and nationals,\u201d in line with relevant laws. The amendment clarifies that this prohibits \u201cdeliberate tracking, surveillance or monitoring of U.S. persons or nationals, including through the procurement or use of commercially acquired personal or identifiable information.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the added language might not do much to override the clause that the Pentagon may use the company\u2019s AI system for all lawful purposes, which could include collecting and analyzing sensitive personal information. \u201cOpenAI can say whatever it wants in its agreement\u2026 but the Pentagon\u2019s gonna use the tech for what it perceives to be lawful,\u201d which could include domestic surveillance, says Jessica Tillipman, a law professor at the George Washington University Law School. \u201cMost of the time, companies are not going to be able to stop the Pentagon from doing anything.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The language also leaves open questions about inadvertent surveillance, and the surveillance of foreign nationals or undocumented immigrants living in the US. \u201cWhat happens when there\u2019s a disagreement about what the law is, or when the law changes?\u201d says Tillipman.<\/p>\n

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. The company has not publicly shared the full text of its new contract.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Beyond the contract, OpenAI says that it will impose technical safeguards to enforce its redline against surveillance, including a \u201csafety stack\u201d that monitors and blocks prohibited uses. The company also says it will deploy its own employees to work with the Pentagon and remain in the loop. But it\u2019s unclear how a safety stack would constrain the Pentagon\u2019s use of the AI, and to what extent OpenAI\u2019s employees would have visibility into how its AI systems are used. More importantly, it\u2019s unclear whether the contract gives OpenAI the power to block a legal use of the technology.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But that might not be a bad thing. Giving an AI company power to pull the plug on its technology in the middle of government operations also carries its own risks. \u201cYou wouldn\u2019t want the US military to ever be in a situation where they legitimately needed to take actions to protect this country\u2019s national security, and you had a private company turn off technology,\u201d says Voss. But that doesn\u2019t mean there shouldn\u2019t be hard lines drawn by Congress, she says.<\/p>\n

None of these questions are simple. They involve brutally difficult tradeoffs between privacy and national security. And that\u2019s why they may be a decision for the public\u2014not for backroom negotiations between the executive branch and a handful of AI companies. For now, AI is being regulated by contracts, not legislation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some lawmakers are starting to weigh in. On Monday, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon is seeking bipartisan support for legislation addressing mass surveillance. He has championed bills restricting the government\u2019s purchase of commercial data, including the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, which was first introduced in 2021 but has not been passed into law. \u201cCreating AI profiles of Americans based on that data represents a chilling expansion of mass surveillance that should not be allowed,\u201d he said in a recent statement<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The ongoing public feud between the Department of Defense and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19164\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}