The Guardian
In the past three months, Donald Trump’s White House has reportedly used AI twice to effect regime change, once in its capture of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and more recently to help plan the strikes that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, says journalist Chris Stokel-Walker. The use of AI tools to enable attacks on Iran heralds a new era of bombing quicker than ‘the speed of thought’, experts have said, amid fears human decision-makers could be sidelined. The US and Israel, which has previously used AI to identify targets in Gaza, launched almost 900 strikes on Iranian targets in the first 12 hours of the war, during which Israeli missiles killed Khamenei.
The most recent strikes coincided with the end of the Pentagon’s relationship with the AI company Anthropic, over concerns its Claude tool was being used for purposes the company had explicitly prohibited. The government swiftly signed a new contract with OpenAI. Public backlash and a rising ‘QuitGPT’ movement led to its chief executive, Sam Altman, saying the startup would explicitly bar its technology from being used for mass surveillance or deployed by defence department intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency. However, the next day, Altman told employees that his company did not control how the Pentagon used their products in military operations.
