It seems to me that AI target-selection systems are being used not just for efficiency, but as a way to distance military staff from responsibility for what they are killing. Current AI models naturally speculate and hallucinate if you don’t tightly constrain them. we see this all the time as software engineers when working with agentic coding.

This creates a dangerous dynamic. AI can generate targets that a human operator might not be able to justify manually, and when something goes wrong the blame can always be shifted to the system, such as the recent incident where roughly 180 children were killed due to faulty targeting.

Israel’s way of fighting this war looks more like pure destruction than a conventional military campaign, and AI systems like this are very easy to abuse in that context. At this point it’s clear that even the U.S. is willing to eliminate targets even when the collateral damage includes the person’s family or neighbors. I don’t think that would have been acceptable in previous administrations. Israel has lowered the bar.

That may be why Anthropic moved early to denounce this kind of usage, even though they had previously partnered with the Department of War.

Now let’s look at the statements made by Anthropic and Hegseth:

https://www.anthropic.com/news/where-stand-department-war

https://x.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070

From Anthropic’s own statement, we hear that they have actually been quite closely partnered. In Hegseth’s tweet we see:

“Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service.”

This shows that Anthropic is still currently being actively used by the Department of War.

My view is that Anthropic and its investors eventually realized that the American war machine will use their technology in reckless ways, and that this will certainly create a massive PR disaster or, in an ideal world, even legal consequences. That realization likely pushed them to adopt what they now frame as a more “humanitarian” position.