Amid everything happening right now, I read with great interest about the technologies used in planning our latest horrid war. According to The Wall Street Journal, Anthropic’s Claude was used in “intelligence assessments, target identification and simulating battle scenarios.” This was all happening in the midst of a lot of sturm and drang between Anthropic and the federal government, during which OpenAI inked a new deal with the United States military.
A few hours before reading all of this, I’d learned of the airstrike on a girls’ school in southern Iran, a bombing that killed nearly two hundred people. Many of those killed were students attending classes.
I don’t have the words to describe how I feel about this.
But I will say one thing.
I am on the record as saying “artificial intelligence” is a failed technology, and I stand by that assessment. These platforms do not work as advertised; features that use them are loathed by the public; they exact terrible mortgages against our future; and they likely wouldn’t even exist were it not for the staggering amounts of capital being poured into them.
It’s that last point I want to focus on for a moment. To put it mildly, the “AI” industry is not built on a sound foundation. Investors are spooked by the staggering amount of debt underpinning the industry’s obscene growth, especially since none of the flagship names care about profitability. And in their desperate search for capital to shore up their ballooning valuations, these companies have turned toward governments, and the nigh-infinite supply of tax dollars they possess. The largest “AI” providers are positively sprinting to enter into procurement agreements with governments — and, more specifically, with the parts of government responsible for violence and war.
Time and again, these organizations have contorted their corporate values to support that sprint. Sarah Shoker, a former lead of OpenAI’s geopolitics team, has written more eloquently than I could about the incoherent policies at these companies around “acceptable” military usage. She notes that OpenAI quietly deleted its outright ban on military usage back in 2024; she also notes that, according to some reporting by Bloomberg, OpenAI has recently agreed to contribute its models for a drone trial.
As it turns out, that “growth at any cost” mindset does have an incredibly high cost. Because what all this corporate flexibility means is that — in addition to all their other many failings — these “AI” platforms are machines of war and death. Anyone infuriated by the military-industrial complex should stop supporting them.
And I don’t just mean monetarily. It’s not lost on me that these commercial “AI” platforms improve by learning. Well, “learning” is too anthropomorphic a verb: these large language models analyze user input, and may be trained on the data we feed them. And as I’ve read about the opening days of this pointless, stupid, awful, horrifying war, I couldn’t help but think that the everyday use of these machines is quite literally enhancing them.
None of this is new, of course. Microsoft’s “AI” products were used by Israel’s military to surveil Palestinians; the 2018 Google Walkouts were driven in part by employees protesting Google’s machine learning contributions to drone strikes; during the height of the Vietnam War, tech workers were mobilizing against the industry’s embrace of defense contracts. But today, we cannot meaningfully separate the everyday use of “AI” platforms from their application in death and war. Imagine asking Northrop Grumman to summarize an email for you, or refactoring code with help from Boeing and Raytheon.
These tools, and the companies that manufacture them, have tremendous costs — to our labor, to our environment, to our futures. And as we’ve been seeing, those costs also include actual human lives.
This has been “Propellant.” a post from Ethan’s journal.