Updates on the White House's conflicted AI posture
How's that whole "supply chain risk" thing going?
Four New York Times reporters collaborated to capture the conflicted state of U.S. national security policy with regard to AI, recapping the story of the past few years and revealing a few obscure tidbits in the process.
One of these reveals is what the military’s policy whiplash towards Anthropic has looked like from the inside. In February, a dispute over the company’s insistence that contracts prohibit its models’ use in domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons resulted in the Pentagon declaring the company a “supply chain risk” in March. Enforcing this threat, in mid-July, major contractors were told to free all of their weapons and control systems of Anthropic’s products by September 1. But within a month, these same contractors received a notification that they could disregard those instructions.
The Pentagon, however, is still insisting that the reprieve is temporary, and that the purge will be total. Anthropic’s models are said to have now been fully removed from the Maven intelligence analysis and target recommendation system, where they had played a key role in suggesting targets for the initial strikes in the current U.S. conflict with Iran.
The administration, of course, caught itself in a bind by trying to swear off a leading AI company just as it was wrapping initial training on a model, Mythos, that would prove to be a step change in cyber capabilities. The NYT piece substantiates a rumor that the National Security Agency was never disallowed from using Anthropic’s products, on the understanding, as one “recently departed senior U.S. official” put it, that forgoing Mythos would have amounted to “unilateral disarmament.”
A separate thread of analysis in the article notes the administration’s internal conflicts with regard to China. In broad strokes, the business-friendly approach that led to permission for American chip giant Nvidia to sell high-end AI chips to China has increasingly come into conflict with the national security establishment, which has come to recognize the destabilizing potential of Mythos-tier models and is determined to keep China from accessing or replicating the technology. The temporary shutdown of Mythos and its consumer version, Fable, in June, reflected this increasingly insistent pressure from security agencies.
Separately, Reuters added to the evolving policy picture this week with an update about the State Department’s “Pax Silica” initiative, an international organization intended to build trusted supply chains for AI and its infrastructure independent of China. Any pretense that the initiative was only about supply chain resilience — the pro-business interpretation — has now been broken by a leaked draft of a letter warning the 35 signatories that they will be kicked out of the group if they join the similar organization China’s president launched in July. So Pax Silica is now mostly about isolating and competing with China — a national security objective. The State Department might not have needed to be transparent about this had the nation of Kazakhstan, a source of critical AI minerals, not decided to cheekily join both coalitions. The letter says, “To be part of everything is to be part of nothing,” which I read as blunt diplomacy-speak for, “You’re either with us or against us.”
The good news is that the NYT piece shows a third policy path potentially opening. It claims that some in the administration have noticed that Chinese officials have been signaling a potential openness to arms control talks on AI. Evan S. Medeiros, a former National Security Council official, says:
On nuclear arms control and on missile defense, we can’t get them to engage. But they appear more interested in the case of A.I.
President Trump is scheduled to meet with President Xi Jinping in Washington in September.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.