Tech sector rallies against Pentagon demands for AI weapons use

The signatories said they hope their leaders will put aside differences 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.”  

Reject Pentagon’s demands  

A separate statement, published by the No Tech For Apartheid coalition, directly calls on Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to refuse Pentagon’s AI terms.  

“We are speaking out today because the Pentagon is demanding that Anthropic abandon two major safety guardrails for Claude, which is the only frontier AI model currently deployed in classified Department of War operations,” the letter states.  

It describes those guardrails as no mass domestic surveillance, no fully autonomous agents, which means “no AI-powered weaponry that can kill people without human oversight.”  

“If any tech company caves to the Pentagon’s demands, War Secretary Pete Hegseth will have won the ability to surveil our communities — here and abroad — en masse, at an unprecedented level. He will have the power to build and deploy AI-powered drones that kill people without the approval of any human,” the letter added.