Dario Amida runs the three hundred and fifty billion US dollar tech company Anthropic. In January, he wrote an essay calling it the adolescence of Technology, a line he lifted from the Jodie Foster film Contact.
If you should meet these vegans and wel delmented only one question to ask of them, What would it be?
Well, I suppose it would be how did you do it? How did you evolve? How did you survive this technological adolescence without destroying yourself?
I was always a science fiction fan as a kid, so you know, I watched this movie when when I was growing up, and just the you know, the idea pose really really seemed to fit the situation we're in with AI, where you know, we have this we're starting to get these immense powers with AI.
Dario warns, the world isn't ready for AI.
You know, it's a bit like a you know, a kind of teenager. You have all these new powers and abilities, mental and physical, but you know you haven't necessarily adapted to them yet, and so you know, this is I feel like this is something that we're going through.
This year, Anthropic has been locked in a battle with the Pentagon over whether it's clawed chatbot can be used for mass surveillance and fully automated weapons. Now it's rival Open AI has stepped into the ring and cut its own deal with the government. I'm Nicole Johnston and you're listening to seven AM today David Rowe from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on Tech titans, robodogs and should AI
help the Pentagon fight wars. It's Monday, March nine. David, could you start by giving us a bit of background about this AI company, Anthropic, and how it ended up in such a bust up with the Pentagon.
So Anthropic is one of the big three AI labs, the leading AI labs in the United States and hence the world. Anthropici, which is building very very capable AI systems, was of interest to the Pentagon. The Pentagon signed a contract under Joe Biden's administration with Anthropic for Anthropic to provide AI at a classified level, so you know, the sort of the most secret, the most elite, the most
high end type of work. It's key founders, Dario Miday and his sister Daniella Amiday, put a couple of hard conditions on its arrangement with the Pentagon.
And so we have said to the Department of War that we are okay with all use cases basically ninety eight or ninety nine percent of the use cases they want to do, except for two that we're concerned about. One is domestic now surveillance. Case Number two is fully autonomous weapons. This is not the partially autonomous weapons that are used in Ukraine or you know, could potentially be used in Taiwan today. This is the idea of making weapons that fire without any human involvement.
When Trump took over, the Pentagon said no, we're not happy with that. We want you to agree that we can use your systems for quote, all lawful purposes.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave CEO Dario Onmaday until the end of the week to sign a document ensuring the military would have full access to the company's AI model. Officials are considering invoking the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to do what the military wants.
Anthropic thought about this for a while and then said no, sorry, we're not comfortable with this. We insist on our two conditions, and then everything went pair shape from there. One other thing that is worth noting is that Anthropic is also the least favorite of the Trump administration's AI companies.
President Trump didn't wait for the five pm deadline to pass, announcing that three forty seven pm he's cutting off AI giant Anthropic, posting on truth social the United States of America will never allow a radical left walk company to dictate how our great military fights and wins wars.
Donald Trump himself also announced that Anthropic could not be used by any US government agency. So we're now in a position where arguably the most capable of the US companies doing this kind of work is now effectively cut out from providing those sorts of support to US war fighters.
So we then had Sam Altman from the Open AI or chat GPT step in and he kind of deal with the Pedagon.
What happened after that, Yeah, So it was only a matter of days, a couple of days before OpenAI announced that it was signing this agreement the US military. What is confusing everyone is that Sam Altman says that those two conditions that Anthropic was insisting on are part of their contract with the Pentagon. So the Pentagon, having refused to agree to making exceptions for autonomous lethal strike and
domestic mass surveillance. It's now agreed to those same conditions with Open AI somewhat suspicious and has not surprisingly led to a lot of skepticism in the AI community and people commenting about this. One other thing worth remembering is that the personal history kind of goes back between Altman, Ammi Day and others. It's a kind of like a big dysfunctional family tree. The whole you know, the top end of the AI community in Silicon Valley. They all
know each other, they've all worked together. Well, there's a lot of kind of personal rivalry, there's a lot of in some cases personal animals between the main players. So that just sort of feeds into this sense of, you know, you've got two competing companies with potentially conflicting or different sets of values, and that this is a real kind of, you know, stand off between tech titans.
David, if we could have a look at the bigger picture, now, Anthropic has these two red lines about how its technology is used. But isn't AI already being used on the battlefields in Gaza, Ukraine possibly across the Middle East right now? So could you describe for us how militaries are employing it?
So at the moment. Most military uses of AI are actually about information processing and turning an ocean of data into a comprehensible picture that human operators can use to make better decisions in real time, often under huge amounts of pressure.
Chasing us human vatching with your tonk doesn't it work?
Are about to witness a live operation.
There is some move towards automation of operations like strike operations, so the Russians, for instance, in Ukraine, are thought to be introducing more and more automation into dropping a bomb or or firing on that target.
We see a Ukrainian tank moving at speed towards the factory. It's deep inside the kill zone and Russian attack drones will try to destroy it.
But for the time being, using machines to decide on a target and fire on that target without any human involvement is still considered to be an ethical red line for most countries around the world for very obvious reasons. I mean, it goes to the heart of the idea of the sanctity of human life. If we start saying that we will allow non sentient, non conscious, morally unaccountable machines to make life or death decisions about human beings.
That is a huge rubicon to cross. That is something that is not happening yet.
So is that essentially the argument that Anthropy has for how it's technology is being used. It's all about ethics for them.
Yeah, although interestingly, Anthropic Statement didn't actually say they were against using autonomous strike per se. They said that the technology is at the moment not good enough to do it reliably and without making mistakes. So it was very interesting that for a company that is known for its safety consciousness with AI seem to be taking a slightly flexible position on the idea of killer robots.
Coming up the Frightening Future of War run by AI David, I was actually in China last year and I saw the robodogs, for example, that they've developed. Could you tell us more about some of this technology killer robots as you describe them, What is really out there on the battlefield now?
So, I mean, those robodogs are fascinating because they make fantastic videos. They look amazing. How useful they actually are in battlefield situations is still pretty dubious.
London Mail, the soldiers scan the skies and use handheld drone detectors.
I mean, the Big revolution in warfighting, which we've seen, particularly through Russia's invasion of Ukraine, is towards aerial drones.
The radio alerts us it's tracking back. The drone detector doesn't stop bleeping.
So that's the big area where some form of robot is being used. Those sorts of things like land based vehicles like robotic dogs, for instance, they're not a big part of war fighting at this point. However, we're seeing less remote controlled type activities where we actually have a human operator sitting there essentially with a kind of a joystick, and we're giving more independence and autonomy to machines on
the ground. Worth also noting that China is very very capable at this They are leading the world when it comes to robotics. The Russians also have learned a lot from the Ukraine War and have been making improvements on that front as well. There's also a concern that they will have lower ethical standards than democracies. So Australia, I'm pretty confident we'll stick to some of those red lines
around things like automation of lethal force. I'm much less confident that China will, and I have next to no confidence that Russia will, so I guess the big strategic peril here is that our standards are forced to start to slip, even in democracies because there is pressure from our adversaries. That means that we risk not being able
to keep up in a battlefield scenario. If you take humans out of the loop entirely, you can operate at a much, much faster pace, and one of the big concerns is that there will just be a slippery slope that we all gradually have to go down in order to keep up in a war situation.
David, it's not only Ukraine and China, it's also Iran. We're seeing how effective their drones are at the moment. But over the weekend we had Sam Oltman. He called for a debate about who should have more power over advanced to AI, whether it should be in the hands of governmental big tech. What do you think how should that debate be discussed.
I would describe the Pentagon anthropic blow up as a kind of first salvo in a conversation that I suspect that we're going to be having for the rest of our lives. The difference with AI companies today is that they are making things that are entering every aspect of
our lives. So we have to ask the question, do we want that kind of influence over our lives to be entirely generated by the private sector, where the government then either acts as a large customer like the military does in buying products from the private sector, or as a regulator from time to time, where the government says, Okay, we're going to set limits on how those products can
be sold and used. Or do we think that this is such a fundamental transformation to our lives that we actually need some kind of partnership between the state and the private sector in the way this stuff is actually built, the way it's sold, the way it's integrated, and the way ultimately that is going to influence how we live our lives. My view is that AI is sufficiently transformative that we all need to have a say in how
it's going to affect our lives. It can't just be a private sector product in which the government then sets some kind of laws or regulations around it. It's much bigger than that.
And finally, David, how do you envisage the battlefields of the future.
I envisage one in which machines and automation are going to play at the overwhelming majority of the roles. The question is to what extent humans remain in the loop. If it's just about technical proficiency, then I reckon within ten to twenty years there wouldn't be humans involved anymore. If we decide that it is a moral and ethical question that humans need to remain involved, then we can ensure that that's the case. But it will take an
active decision on our part. Without active ethical discussion, warfare will end up being a fight between two lots of machines, and only when those machines are fully destroyed will people actually start fighting. And then follow that to its logical conclusion and we'll get back to sticks and stones. But in a nutshell, well, it will be machines fighting machines unless we insist on human involvement for moral and ethical reasons.
David, thank you so much for talking to us.
Thanks so much.
Also in the news, people in Katherine are assessing the damage after the town's worst flooding in twenty eight years. Homes and businesses have been inundated with water which reached as high as roof level in some areas. Locals have been evacuated to Darwin with the Bureau of Meteorology warning more rainfall is possible over the next few days, which could see the Catherine River rise even further, and the May budget will have no cash for wind or solar farms.
According to reports, new spending on the renewable rollout has been halted in an attempt by the federal government to claw back savings. That's despite concerns Australia is behind on its target to reach eighty two percent green energy by twenty thirty. I'm Nicole Johnston. This is seven am. Thanks for listening.