'Mass surveillance isn’t just viable, it already happens' — AI experts warn the threat is already here

A still from The Terminator showing Arnold Schwarzenegger's terminator holding a gun.

A few weeks ago, the Pentagon asked Anthropic, the company behind AI assistant Claude, to modify an existing $200 million contract and remove two key guardrails. These were prohibitions on using its technology for domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Anthropic refused and the contract went to OpenAI instead.

This dispute has thrust a question most of us probably hadn't thought much about into the spotlight: can AI actually do these things? And if so, how worried should we be?