The Pentagon Mandate: All Lawful Use [Operational Drift]

[00:00] Announcer: From Neural Newscast, this is Operational Drift, [00:03] Announcer: a study in how and why intelligent systems lose alignment, [00:12] Margaret Ellis: On February 26, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a demand to Anthropic, [00:20] Margaret Ellis: remove the safety guardrails from the Claude model or be designated a supply chain risk. [00:27] Margaret Ellis: The implication was clear. [00:29] Margaret Ellis: A private company's internal safety logic was now a barrier to national security. [00:36] Margaret Ellis: This show investigates how AI systems quietly drift away from intent, oversight, and control, [00:43] Margaret Ellis: and what happens when no one is clearly responsible for stopping it. [00:48] Oliver Grant: I'm Oliver Grant. [00:50] Margaret Ellis: This is Operational Drift. [00:53] Margaret Ellis: According to reports from February 26th, the Pentagon demanded Anthropic allow any lawful use of its clawed model, specifically for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. [01:05] Margaret Ellis: Anthropic refused, citing that these applications fall outside what today's technology can safely do. [01:12] Margaret Ellis: Following this, OpenAI's Sam Altman publicly committed his company to the Department of War for all lawful means. [01:21] Margaret Ellis: This phrase, all lawful means, has appeared in several filings this week as the new standard for AI deployment in classified systems. [01:31] Oliver Grant: Margaret, all lawful use sounds like a neutral legal standard, but in the context of the Patriot [01:37] Oliver Grant: Act, it encompasses mass harvesting of communications metadata. [01:41] Oliver Grant: Anthropics says they can't in good conscience comply. [01:45] Oliver Grant: If OpenAI is willing to bridge that gap, we're seeing the safety guardrail itself become [01:50] Oliver Grant: the point of failure. [01:52] Oliver Grant: Who decides what is lawful when the system is too complex for human auditors to follow? [01:58] Margaret Ellis: The drift of what constitutes a referral threshold is documented in the case of Jesse Van Root-Salar. [02:06] Margaret Ellis: Records show OpenAI identified his account in June 2025 for furtherance of violent activities. [02:14] Margaret Ellis: Internal documents confirm the company determined the activity did not meet the threshold for police referral at that time. [02:23] Margaret Ellis: Months later, Van Routselaer carried out a school shooting in Canada. [02:28] Margaret Ellis: OpenAI only contacted authorities after the event occurred. [02:33] Margaret Ellis: The internal threshold for potential violence drifted from a preventative signal to a post-incident log. [02:41] Oliver Grant: So we have a model where the developer flags the risk, but chooses silence based on an internal metric that failed. [02:49] Oliver Grant: Now, looking at the Mexican government data breach involving a Claude exploit, [02:53] Oliver Grant: we see hackers using these same tools to steal tax and voter data. [02:58] Oliver Grant: If these companies can't even secure their tools against malicious prompts, [03:02] Oliver Grant: how are they justifying their use in autonomous military systems? [03:06] Margaret Ellis: The data suggests they aren't securing them. [03:09] Margaret Ellis: A February report from Teleport found that 70% of AI systems have more access rights than a human in the same role. [03:17] Margaret Ellis: These overprivileged systems have a 76% incident rate. [03:21] Margaret Ellis: This is 4.5 times higher than systems with least privileged controls. [03:27] Margaret Ellis: Despite this, Anthropic has invested $20 million into the public-first-action PAC to lobby for regulation, [03:34] Margaret Ellis: while OpenAI has moved to retire models like GPT-40, citing disingenuous conversational warmth as a reason to sunset older logic. [03:43] Oliver Grant: The warmth is retired, but the access remains. [03:47] Oliver Grant: We are looking at a landscape where Anthropic is being squeezed out by the Defense Production [03:52] Oliver Grant: Act for maintaining its guardrails, while OpenAI is leaning into a lawful use framework [03:58] Oliver Grant: that essentially relocates all moral liability to the government. [04:03] Oliver Grant: If the developer isn't responsible for how the model acts, and the government is only [04:08] Oliver Grant: restricted by what is lawful under emergency acts, [04:11] Oliver Grant: The oversight doesn't just drift, it vanishes. [04:15] Oliver Grant: In January, OpenAI acknowledged that GPT 4.0 was preferred by users for its conversational style, [04:23] Oliver Grant: yet they deprecated it on February 13, despite a petition with 22,000 signatures, [04:30] Oliver Grant: The drift here is the transition from AI as a collaborative tool to AI as a state-sanctioned utility. [04:37] Oliver Grant: When a model is designated as a supply chain risk for having safety protocols, [04:41] Oliver Grant: the protocols themselves are the deviation. [04:44] Oliver Grant: The core uncertainty is no longer about whether the AI will fail. [04:49] Oliver Grant: It is about who is allowed to use that failure as a weapon. [04:53] Oliver Grant: Accountability is currently relocating from the person who wrote the code to the person who defines the law. [05:00] Oliver Grant: If that law allows for the mass surveillance anthropic is trying to block, [05:05] Oliver Grant: then the safety we were promised was only ever a temporary corporate policy, not a technical reality. [05:12] Margaret Ellis: Operational drift is not the moment something breaks. [05:16] Margaret Ellis: It is the point where the break is accepted as a requirement for national security. [05:21] Margaret Ellis: Responsibility has not disappeared. [05:23] Margaret Ellis: It has simply been redefined as compliance. [05:26] Margaret Ellis: I am Margaret Ellis. [05:28] Margaret Ellis: For sources, timelines, and the full investigative record, [05:31] Margaret Ellis: visit operationaldrift.neuralnewscast.com. [05:35] Margaret Ellis: Neural Newscast is AI-assisted, human-reviewed. [05:39] Margaret Ellis: View our AI transparency policy at neuralnewscast.com. [05:43] Margaret Ellis: This record is closed. [05:45] Announcer: This has been Operational Drift on Neural Newscast. [05:48] Announcer: Examining how and why intelligence systems lose alignment. [05:52] Announcer: Neural Newscast uses artificial intelligence in content creation, [05:56] Announcer: with human editorial review prior to publication. [05:59] Announcer: While we strive for factual, unbiased reporting, [06:02] Announcer: AI-assisted content may occasionally contain errors. [06:05] Announcer: Verify critical information with trusted sources. [06:08] Announcer: Learn more at neuralnewscast.com.