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The bitter courtroom<\/span> brawl between Elon Musk and Sam Altman captivating the tech industry this week revolves in no small part around fears that artificial intelligence technologies both men are building could spiral out of control and exterminate humanity. Such far-looking scenarios obscure the fact that tech companies are enlisting to kill today.<\/p>\n Musk\u2019s break with OpenAI, which he co-founded in 2015, is in a sense a lawsuit about safety. He contends that Altman betrayed the company\u2019s original nonprofit mission of safely and responsibly pursuing artificial intelligence for the public benefit by converting it into the revenue-maximizing behemoth it has become. According to Musk, the stakes of this are existential for the human race: \u201cIt could kill us all,\u201d he testified on Tuesday. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to have a \u2018Terminator\u2019 outcome.\u201d<\/p>\n The AI safety community frequently invokes<\/a> these dystopian scenarios<\/a> to both warn the public about the technology\u2019s risks and implicitly boast of its great power. While such a science-fiction future may lay ahead, these warnings overlook the deadly present. Artificial intelligence is already targeting humans with the blessing of Musk and his rivals.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Musk and others who caution about an uprising of sentient killer machines are anticipating the emergence of \u201cartificial general intelligence<\/a>,\u201d an ill-defined form of superior machine reasoning that may never come to pass. But their fear that AI could kill us all is less hypothetical for those living in places targeted by the Trump administration\u2019s global wars. In Iran, for instance, Anthropic\u2019s Claude AI model \u201csuggested hundreds of targets, issued precise location coordinates, and prioritized those targets according to importance,\u201d according to the Washington Post<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201c There\u2019s a real danger of Skynet-like outcomes even without a Skynet-style takeover.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n \u201cThe risks of integrating frontier AI into the nation\u2019s most lethal capabilities are already existential, both for civilians swept up in the violence and destruction of AI-enabled wars, and rank-and-file troops that have to live with the consequences of potentially unsafe weapons they can\u2019t control,\u201d Amoh Toh, senior counsel at Brennan Center\u2019s Liberty and National Security Program, told The Intercept. \u201cExisting AI models are already pushing policymakers and militaries toward nuclear escalation \u2014 there\u2019s a real danger of Skynet-like outcomes even without a Skynet-style takeover.\u201d<\/p>\n Silicon Valley has widely embraced AI military contracts<\/a> despite its worries over lethal AI.\u00a0Amazon, OpenAI, Musk\u2019s xAI, and Microsoft all earn money from selling large language model services to the Pentagon. Even Anthropic, accused of \u201cbetrayal\u201d by War Secretary Pete Hegseth and declared a national supply chain risk for mounting the smallest of opposition to the Pentagon\u2019s terms, is still keen to participate in the national kill chain<\/a>. \u201cAnthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences,\u201d CEO Dario Amodei wrote<\/a> in a blog post a week after the United States bombed an elementary school in Iran<\/a>, killing more than 100 children. <\/p>\n Google offers a telling illustration of the industry\u2019s increasing coziness with selling AI to the military. Following a 2018 employee revolt over Project Maven<\/a>, a contract to help target Pentagon airstrikes<\/a>, CEO Sundar Pichai pledged his company would swear off the business of killing<\/a>. He wrote in a company blog post that Google would not pursue deals that could cause harm, including applications whose \u201cprincipal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people.\u201d He added: \u201cThese are not theoretical concepts, they are concrete standards that will actively govern our research and product development and will impact our business decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n After watching AI help wage a war that has already killed<\/a> over 1,700 Iranian civilians, Google this week sent a clear message: We want in. In a deal that makes explicit the extent to which company leadership has abandoned its AI principles, Google agreed to provide AI services to the Pentagon that allow for \u201cclassified workloads,\u201d sensitive military work that encompasses tasks like intelligence analysis and targeting airstrikes, The Information reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n Executives say they\u2019re terrified of the technology killing by accident, while wholly supportive of using it to kill on purpose.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n According to the tech news outlet, the deal allows the U.S. military to use Google\u2019s AI models for \u201cany lawful government purpose\u201d \u2014 a carveout that could allow any uses the administration deems legal. Take, for example, the Trump administration\u2019s Operation Southern Spear, the ongoing aerial assassination program against civilian boats<\/a> accused of drug trafficking<\/a> that has killed<\/a> more than 180 people to date. The campaign has been widely condemned<\/a> as illegal<\/a> under both<\/a> international and U.S. law, but the administration has deemed its own actions legal through a Department of Justice memo that remains secret<\/a>. On Friday, the Pentagon announced<\/a> additional \u201clawful operational use\u201d deals with Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon as well.<\/p>\n The Google contract reportedly includes a toothless and unenforceable provision gesturing at concerns over autonomous and spying. \u201cWe remain committed to the private and public sector consensus that AI should not be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry without appropriate human oversight,\u201d the clause reportedly states.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Don\u2019t regulate us or it\u2019ll kill innovation.\u2019 \u2026 The reality of Google\u2019s work with the military is it\u2019s part of a tech-military ecosystem that\u2019s killing people today.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n \u201cWhen I worked at Google, they would spend a lot of time punting into the future, promising a future that would never come,\u201d said William Fitzgerald, a former Google employee who helped organize the 2018 worker-led campaign against the Maven contract. \u201c\u2018Don\u2019t regulate us or it\u2019ll kill innovation.\u2019 The talking point is the same today. The reality of Google\u2019s work with the military is it\u2019s part of a tech-military ecosystem that\u2019s killing people today.\u201d<\/p>\n Google spokesperson Kate Dreyer did not respond to questions about the contract\u2019s language, instead touting how the company\u2019s military work applies \u201cto areas like logistics, cybersecurity, diplomatic translation, fleet maintenance, and the defense of critical infrastructure.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n
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