>We are essentially offloading our moral responsibility to a black box that cannot be held accountable.

We already did it with companies, buddy!

We don't need to look to science fiction for lessons about where this will lead. Fact has already caught up.

The IDF used tools like Lavender and "Is Daddy Home" to analyze communications, identify members of Hamas, and learn when they were home so they could be killed with bomb strikes.

This has long been possible for humans to do, but it's a laborious process. In the past, only people high up in chains of command received such bespoke treatment. AI tools permitted the IDF to grant the same treatment to raw recruits who had been given the sum total of a pep-talk and a pistol.

The result was widespread destruction and indiscriminate killing of civilians. The IDF didn't spend much time scrutinizing AI recommendations and were willing to act on false positives. Every bomb strike, by design (i.e. "Is Daddy home"'s purpose was to determine when targets were in their family homes), took out civilians. Just taking a pizza order from a Hamas member years before the war might have been enough to get entire families and their neighbours killed.

If humans hate another group of humans enough and an AI says "Kill", they'll kill. Without thought or remorse. We don't merely need to be worried about murderous robots on battlefields, we also need to worry about humans implementing the recommendations of AI without thinking for themselves.

“A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”

To be fair, AI will likely be more moral then Hegseth, Vance and Trump combo. At worst, it will be as bad as them.

ChatGPT told me Nukes are good for health. Japan was a brutal feudal society. It changed them overnight.

Seems to be very much by design. I would call it an "artificial singularity" though. It's not the real thing, just advertise to make it sort of look like one to the plebs.

The fact that there's a law that says then can do it doesn't make it just or moral.

They have Grok, why do they need to bully Anthropic?

> Frank Herbert wrote something that is particularly prescient.

Curiously enough the Dune books are a strong rebuke against prescience (read: humanity coveting precog abilities.) I'll leave it at that to avoid spoilering.

Keep an eye on the next movie this year!

> I'm really surprised Substack thinks Australia's social media laws apply to them.

Why would they not?

metalman's comment is great as well but if you are interested here is the archive.org link to the article.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260226214404/https://garymarcu...

I think this should just go work. Hope this helps.

Edit: this is my first time using archive.org for susbtack and looks like it doesn't work/ shows page not found after some time.

I have now used singlefile to get the index.html and put it to github pages for anyone to see.

https://serjaimelannister.github.io/american-article/

And I have also created an archive of the GH page itself, here's the link to archive.org itself as well which should work

https://web.archive.org/web/20260226235745/https://serjaimel...

I did not have to verify anything, so here is the text

Marcus on AI

America, and probably the world, stands on a precipice. Call your Senators and Representatives, right now. Gary Marcus Feb 26, 2026 As I wrote here yesterday, Anthropic’s showdown with The US Department of War may literally be life or death for all of us. If Pete Hegseth forces Dario Amodei to fold, not one but two monstrous precedents will be set.

The first is obvious, and terrible in itself. The second is subtle but no less important.

The first is that what Secretary Hegseth is demanding, backed by heavy threats, is that the US military have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic’s AI software, for applications such as military surveillance and autonomous weapons without humans in the loop. This could well extend to nuclear weapons.1

Nothing that I have read convinces me that Secretary Hegseth has a nuanced understanding of the strengths and limits of current AI, or that he will show restraint in how he applies it. Rather he is trying to define his career in part around deploying AI as broadly and as quickly as possible.

The second is that Hegseth’s maneuver is an audacious power grabs that aims to circumvent Congress. By setting a deadline of 5:01 PM eastern tomorrow, Hegseth aims to cut everybody else – even Congress — out of the loop.

A reader of this newsletter, a tech writer who describes himself as a political independent just wrote to me, rightfully panicked:

Today the Pentagon will force Anthropic to change their corporate goal of responsible AI. This is not something to be decided in the marketplace by a bully with deep pockets; it must be decided in Congress. Senators and Congressmen must take a position and deliberate in public about whether it is OK to use AI for surveillance of Americans and to launch lethal strikes controlled by AI with no “human in the loop”. Please say something today, before Amodei has to surrender.

He is right.

Please call or write your Senators and Representatives right now.

§

AI policy, especially of this magnitude, is something that American people should have a say in. Congress should deliberate. Mass surveillance and AI-fueled weapons, possibly nuclear, without humans in the loop are categorically not things that one individual, even one in the Cabinet, should be allowed to decide at a gunpoint.

But that is exactly where we are headed.

1 Hegsseth’s demand would in principle extend to apply Anthropic’s software to nuclear weapons without humans in the loop. In that connection, people should probably be aware of the fact that S. 1394 - Block Nuclear Launch by Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Act of 2023 failed to pass. Which means we might not have a Stanislav Petrov next time around.

Discussion about this post Write a comment... Richard Self 7h

Given the unreliability of GenAI in everything that it do, the use in unsupervised warfare will be catastrophic.

Reply Share 1 reply Roman's Attic 7h

From what I’ve heard, these calls are especially valuable if you emphasize that this is an issue that will determine how you vote in the future

Reply Share 1 reply 58 more comments...

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Play the ball, not the man.

This doesn't spark curiosity though. Good hackers don't care about any of this. Let's talk about compilers.

Sir, please stick to the instructions of the palantir corporate handbook to talk to upper management. The correct way to summon Peter Thiel is to stand in front of a mirror at midnight during a full moon and whisper his name three times with the cloned voice of Alex Karp.

Have a nice day.

> our political system is broken

I mean, I agree with you, but if you've only realized that now, you've missed out on some really weird stuff going on for the past couple of years.

Serious question, do you think that the government shouldn't have authority over corporations in its jurisdiction? Not that this is necessarily the right way to do it, but this is rhetoric that would make a devout libertarian blush. Ultimately the government is threatening to nationalize what is new a key wartime industry in preparation for war, that does not seem to me like an abuse of power.

Welcome to the return of history. This is hardly the first time or industry where the US government has forced compliance that wasn't necessarily in the public interest.

And the corporations won't fight this. They're in it for the money and they're willing to bring actual gold bars to White House to ensure it keeps rolling in. They know what they're doing is corrosive and debasing, the more conscientious of them probably want to vomit on the inside. But they mostly suck it up and do it anyway, for their investors will discipline them if they don't.

Either people run candidates and vote for the ones that campaign on stopping this, or it happens.

It’s not the type of behavior that you find in nations operating based on the rule of law. It’s emblematic of where the things are heading for the United States. A rapid descent into fascism (call it what it is).

This seems like a classic case of "the boy who cried wolf". Almost everything Gary Marcus says has been trivially dismissable, and often soon proven wrong.

If someone like that wants to be in a position to warn society of actual harms, they'd have to behave differently.