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Google and Pentagon reportedly agree on deal for 'any lawful' use of AI
- morkalork 6mo agoWill lawful use be determined in secret courts a la NSA and FISA?
- Sanzig 6mo agoDoubtful it will even get that far, the DoJ will simply draft an appropriate fig leaf memo with a predetermined conclusion and the government will simply plow on ahead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_Memos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_Memos
- stephbook 6mo agoThey simply say they have that memo. Who knows whether they even drafted it for real? And if anyone starts looking, Gemini can quickly draft one itself. Nice!
- vrganj 6mo agoDon't be silly. "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal." - Richard Nixon
- kentm 6mo agoAlso the Supreme Court, half of Congress, and apparently something like 40% of the American populace.
- ceejayoz 6mo agoWho defines "lawful" if Google and the Pentagon disagree? > The classified deal apparently doesn’t allow Google to veto how the government will use its AI models. Seems concerning?
- belzebub 6mo agoThere's big air quotes energy in their statement
- tdb7893 6mo agoEspecially concerning with the how creative the executive branch can be when it comes to what laws mean. With little oversight, it seems guaranteed that it will be used for unlawful activities (despite whatever tortured argument some lawyer will have put into a memo somewhere).
- xp84 6mo agoYeah, they’re really bad! Seems like it might be time to try convincing people to vote for someone else! Democrats haven’t tried that play since 2012, preferring the “scorn and insult anyone outside your base” strategy that’s worked so well since.
- f33d5173 6mo agoLawful is presumably defined in the usual, common sense, ie we can do whatever the f we want until a court physically forces us not to.
- dmd 6mo agoAnd since the court has no way to physically force anything - that's the executive branch's function, (it's right there in the name) - lawful has no meaning whatsoever if it's the executive branch that wants to break the law.
- muvlon 6mo agoAnd the Pentagon has historically gotten away with damn near everything even in the judicial branch by appealing to national security.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- jcgrillo 6mo agoIt's pretty funny how these guys are all becoming some kind of internet version of, like, Halliburton. It seems pretty desperate. B2C and B2B applications didn't pan out I guess?
- zarzavat 6mo agoIt's one of two identified uses for AI that is profitable today: writing code and blowing up schools. They are desperate to show the market that the technology is anything more than a money pit.
- ctoth 6mo agoThe thing is we're in a new Cold War, and most of our adversaries have gotten the memo and most of us ... haven't. Yes, becoming a new Halliburton is a rational move if you see the board right now. I don't like it even one tiny bit.
- plytow 6mo ago[dead]
- a456463 6mo agoI don't like it even tiny bit. But other people are doing it, so I mma go full steam ahead. This is exactly what got us here.
- jcgrillo 6mo agoIf that's the case we ought to be investing in technology that actually delivers results. Patriot missiles work. Javelins work. M777's work. AI? Dunno man.. Instead it seems like what's happening here is Google has found a gullible customer that is willing to pay for something that doesn't necessarily deliver.
- tombert 6mo agoWhen my sister and I would play monopoly as kids, we had lost the manual so whenever we didn’t like the outcome of whatever happened, we would make up rules about what was right. Technically then, it was very easy stay compliant while still being able to do well because we could rewrite the rules. Also, since I was older I feel like I was able to get away with those redefinitions a lot more often…
- cucumber3732842 6mo agoThe big reason it's "obvious" when tech megacorps do it is because big tech is new to the game and doesn't have an existing regulatory capture system already up and running and legitimized like medical, civil engineering, energy, agriculture, chemical, etc, do. If this were 3M making nasty stuff for Northrop to put in bombs and drop on brown people or Exxon scheming up something bad in Alaska or bulldozing a national park for solar panels or some other legacy BigCo doing slimy things that are in the interests of them and the government but against the interest of the public they'd have 40yr of preexisting trade group publications, bought and paid for academic and media chatter, etc, etc, that they could point to and say "look, this is fine because the stuff we paid into in advance to legitimize these sorts of things as they come up says it is" though obviously they'd use very different words.
- SecretDreams 6mo ago> If this were 3M making nasty stuff for Northrop to put in bombs and drop on brown people or Exxon scheming up something bad in Alaska or bulldozing a national park for solar panels or some other legacy BigCo doing slimy things that are in the interests of them and the government but against the interest of the public they'd have 40yr of preexisting trade group publications, bought and paid for academic and media chatter, etc, etc, they could point to and say "look, this is fine because the stuff we paid into in advance to legitimize these sorts of things as they come up says it is" though obviously they'd use very different words. My friend, this paragraph needed some periods. I could not follow what you were trying to say - but it seemed interesting enough to consider retyping.
- hgoel 6mo agoHow well does this hold up in terms of legal scrutiny when previous actions indicate that the Pentagon would retaliate against Google if they didn't accept this "lawful use only" farce? Could Google back out of this agreement later by arguing that they were coerced? Not trying to suggest that Google would be opposed to doing evil, but curious about how solid this agreement would be in practice.
- john_strinlai 6mo agothere is 0 reason that the definitions of 'lawful' for the purposes of these agreements should be classified.
- svachalek 6mo agoThere's a reason, you just won't like it.
- mullingitover 6mo agoReminder that this administration has some absolute howler theories about what constitutes lawful behavior[1]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/us/politics/tom-homan-fbi-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/us/politics/tom-homan-fbi...
- shevy-java 6mo agoThe beginning of Skynet 6.0.
- qznc 6mo agoAnd that is news-worthy because unlawful use is normal?
- r4indeer 6mo agoThe deal is in contrast to Anthropic and OpenAI who wanted additional restrictions regarding the use of their models for autonomous weapon control and domestic mass surveillance. The US government agreed to these terms in the case of OpenAI [0], yet publicly denounced Anthropic for wanting the same thing [1]. [0] https://openai.com/de-DE/index/our-agreement-with-the-department-of-war/ https://openai.com/de-DE/index/our-agreement-with-the-depart... [1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-comments-secretary-war https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-comments-secretary-...
- ChrisArchitect 6mo agohttps://archive.ph/FyzNS https://archive.ph/FyzNS
- ChrisArchitect 6mo agoOne source: https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-signs-classified-ai-deal-with-pentagon-information-reports-2026-04-28/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-signs-classified-a... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47931336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47931336)
- Brian_K_White 6mo agoWhat a handy word "lawful".
- Imnimo 6mo agoUnsurprising from Google, but still bad. If Google has no right to object to a particular use, this is equivalent in practice to "any use, lawful or not".
- anygivnthursday 6mo agoIs Iran already a vibe war or those are just coming?
- anematode 6mo agoWho could have seen this one coming. From yesterday: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-ai-pentagon-classified-use-employee-letter/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-ai-pentagon-classified-u... ("Hundreds of Google workers urge CEO to refuse classified AI work with Pentagon"). Any AI researcher who continues to work here is morally compromised.
- devin 6mo agoThat's what the 7 figure salaries are for.
- testfrequency 6mo agoIt’s funny to me how many progressive people I know and am friends with who work at these AI companies which are marginalized demographics (Trans, Gay, Latino, Black). Still have faded Bernie stickers on their cars, No Kings organizers, “fuck SF I’m in the east bay for life fuck tech” - and you all make 7 figures Monday - Friday by supporting the death of society and democracy. I don’t dare say anything though because “money is money”, the bay is expensive..but I do sure as shit judge every single person I know who joined OAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta.
- site-packages1 6mo agoI would suggest looking inwards if this is how you really feel.
- gambiting 6mo agoI'm curious what is that you're suggesting, exactly.
- site-packages1 6mo agoI made another comment above. People contain multitudes. Different contexts, different choices, not everyone is in a box defined by the viewer's world view. You can't really know what's going on with someone else, in their heads, in their context, so give them some grace. Instead, this person's "friends" are "hypocrites" who were "lured" into their choices. It's very condescending. I am suggesting the poster re-examine their own views on other people in light of this.
- cdrnsf 6mo agoLawful is meaningless in the context of the Trump administration. Should Google waver (which they won't), they'll be declared a supply chain risk or otherwise bullied into submission.
- Ritewut 6mo agoGoogle holds immense power in their position. Trump can make their life very difficult but Google can make life for Trump very difficult as well. They have no need to kneel, they are choosing to.
- sailfast 6mo agoThis all works if you assume that any action the government takes must be “lawful”. The assumption here is that the Pentagon is obeying the law and any unlawful use would go through normal reporting / violation channels - same as any illegal order or violation or whistleblower report. The Pentagon does not want Google or anyone else deciding what they can and cannot use their AI for. They’re saying we won’t break the law, and that should be enough for you - pinky swear! And that seems to be enough for Google. Though I might request some auditing capability that is agentic to verify rather than take them at their word. Next step: is Google FEDRAMP’d yet for this and for classified enclaves? Or do they also go through Palantir’s AI vehicle?
- gwbas1c 6mo agoI look at this as a case of "pick your battles." In war, the civilians can't audit every move of the military. (It's impractical, both for reacting timely, and for keeping secrets from the enemy.) If the military doesn't work with Google, they will work with someone else who might not put the same amount of pressure on the military about the practical limits on AI. Or, even worse, our enemy might use a significantly better AI that we do. My hope is that "war" shifts to AI vs AI, machine vs machine. Calling people who work on AI for wartime purposes immoral is fundamentally immoral when AI in war replaces the need for human casulties.
- mitthrowaway2 6mo agoAs a private contractor, you can sign a contract to deliver pizza or bandages to US soldiers, but also put into the contract that you won't deliver lethal weapons, if that's your own ethical stance. You don't need to audit every move of the military, just the stuff you're doing at their request. And sure, maybe that just means the military decides to take their business elsewhere. But if you have confidence that your service is the best, then you sell based on that.
- eks391 6mo agoI think you and your parent have great arguments. Your pizza deliverer chose his battle, which was to only deliver pizza, not materiel, and is commendable. Your parent seems to want to delegate death from humans to AI, which seems to me like a simplification that won't turn out exactly like that, but the premise of deciding whether that is a battle to pick is valid. If you want to start blurring the lines between the analogy and literality, if you choose to pick every battle to fight, there's not enough human bandwidth to do it all, and delegation to AI could be helpful. That last sentence is more loose, so I won't defend it, but I couldn't help not making a tie between picking your battles and literal battles. Perhaps a form of dark humor there.
- vrganj 6mo agoSee also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust Capital and Big Tech have always been opportunistic enablers, not principled actors. Corporate Values have always been nothing but internal propaganda. "Don't be evil", what a farce.
- flufluflufluffy 6mo ago> We remain committed to the private and public sector consensus that AI should not be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry without appropriate human oversight. And starts the lying to our faces. The public and private (from your own employees!) consensus is that it should not be used for those things at all, regardless of “human oversight.”
- calgoo 6mo agoI hate this part: `domestic mass surveillance` So the rest of the world is fine to spy on, its the domestic part they don't agree with. So go on, destroy lives all around the world, helping the powers at be build the fascist state. Its fine to use Gemini to tell what building to blow up; its fine for Gemini to wrongly identify people and cause hundreds or thousands of deaths based on the telling the military who to attack.
- ctoth 6mo agoHuh. I never realized the T-800 runs on Android. Makes sense, I guess.
- psychoslave 6mo agoDo no evil. Well don't make anything illegal at least. I mean, let's not do what is different from whatever we wish at the moment.
- threepts 6mo agoEvil to them is not making money. It's pretty subjective.
- qwerpy 6mo ago[dead]
- chabes 6mo agoSnakes. All of them
- ripvanwinkle 6mo agoOne observation. Having your work being used by the govt in ways you disagree with feels similar to having your taxes used in ways you disagree. When you pay taxes you have no say in the bombs acquired with that and where they are dropped. The latter though doesn't seem to provoke the same push back
- Barrin92 6mo agoyou answered your own implicit question. You have a choice who you sell your work to, you don't have a choice what your taxes do. Seems pretty straight forward why the former elicits more push back. The government forces you to pay taxes it doesn't force you to build them tools of surveillance or weapons.
- ripvanwinkle 6mo agoIF the feds are a sufficiently large market your viability as a business might depend on keeping them happy. btw i am not making a judgement call on the ai usage issue itself, just saying that this and taxes are more equivalent than it might seem
- Barrin92 6mo ago>IF the feds are a sufficiently large market your viability as a business sure if you're Lockheed you might be screwed, but that's not the case for Google. Military contracts, or even government contracts as a whole are a tiny fraction of the King Kong Sized gorilla that is Google. The fact that Anthropic puts up a fight but OpenAI/Microsoft and Google don't I find hard to characterize as anything other than pathetic. These guys could, if the wanted to, afford a lawyer or to two to push back on the administration. They do that pretty successfully with their taxes in most places btw.
- dmit 6mo ago> When you pay taxes you have no say in the bombs acquired with that and where they are dropped. Vote in elections, local and general.
- 6mo ago
- mattdeboard 6mo ago"don't be evil"
- joering2 6mo agoThe sign contract for any lawful use ?? Can you sign a contract with US government for some unlawful use??
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- HNisCIS 6mo agoRefusing to participate WORKS. I've had the unfortunate experience of working at a startup that started courting some autonomous weapons companies and HOLY SHIT were they the bottom of the barrel. Levels of incompetence you wouldn't believe, just good ol' boys who wanted to play with energetics. Then the company I was working for also hemorrhaged all their top engineers because they found the work unsettling. The takeaway is that your refusal to assist these shitheads does have an impact, they have to pay more for talent and they have a much harder time courting good talent.
- ethin 6mo agoThe fundamental problem with these "agreements" is that they are utterly nonsensical as written. Google has one idea of "lawful" and what it means; the Pentagon most definitely has a vastly different interpretation meaning "whatever we want". These companies make these agreements because they do not understand (either deliberately or just by the factor of them not understanding the intelligence sector) that when the intelligence community says "we will only use this for lawful purposes," what they are really telling you is something very, very different. With entities like the Pentagon your agreements should probably both define what "lawful" really means and should provide as few ambiguities as you can manage. Ideally you'd provide zero ambiguities but I'm not sure that's achievable in practice.
- grafmax 6mo agoThere's a lot of money in genocide.
- SpicyLemonZest 6mo agoAs a big critic of the OpenAI deal, this kinda sounds like a nothingburger to me. Of course Google doesn't get a veto on operational decisions, no customer would ever agree to such a thing. The problem with OpenAI was that they took advantage of Anthropic standing their ground to wedge their way in, which was both bad on its own terms and raises serious concerns about whether they're being honest on the real terms of the deal.
- threepts 6mo agoand the pentagon determines the law?
- Havoc 6mo agoAnd in love and war all is fair... Reality is this ship sailed once the US/Palantir rolled out AI target selection
- jldugger 6mo ago"When the president does it, that means it is not illegal" -- a former president
- OtomotO 6mo agoLawful means nothing but "according to law", which is a meaningless statement... Remember that even the third Reich had laws!
- kbelder 6mo agoThat's how I'd like Google to behave in regards to dealing with me.
- franciscator 6mo agoDo not get distracted, that technology is used to kill people.
- jMyles 6mo agoThese deals / arrangements / affronts / conspiracies will continue as long as there are sums of money too large to say no to. It's so unbelievably obvious at this point that the Pentagon, and everything like it across the globe, needs a deprecation plan. We don't need these massive states anymore for security or regularity; we can communicate around the world at the speed of light and bypass their notions of how we're supposed to relate to one another. Enough is enough. Spin down the nukes. Bring home the ships. Send the money back.
- CrzyLngPwd 6mo agoMeh. Lawful didn't stop Project MKUltra, or attacking countless countries, or overthrowing countless governments, or murdering countless people, or kidnapping people and torturing them, or... The USA can do anything it wants, to anyone, any time.
- pkilgore 6mo agoNo remedies, no right. What are the consequences of breach? Otherwise, Americans only use for this is to wipe their ass, and only if they can find a paper version.
- aaroninsf 6mo agoI'm not going to even bother trying it, but I assume that the top Google autocomplete for "lawful" is "evil"
- PunchTornado 6mo agovery disappointed. if I could, I would sell my google stock and buy anthropic. can't wait for anthropic to ipo. I love them.
- manicennui 6mo agoThis administration has already proven that they don't care about the law and see anything they do as lawful.
- exabrial 6mo agoThis whole thing is sorta blown out of context; but it does make explosive journalism, sell a bunch of ad revenue, and give Anthropic a lot of publicity (whom I think is just amoral here). The bottom line is in the past the US government has acquired weapons/tech with deals like "it will never be used for X purpose". However, as far as my research has shown, it has never accepted deal where said weapons or tech has self-policing features. For instance, a bomb that would refused to explode over US soil or something like that. And it makes sense why they would refuse such deals, as it would be a security risk, or a system that could be exploited against them by an enemy. Of course that does not make great headlines. And given the current administration and how news headlines are written these days, it makes sense this is the way this whole thing went down.
- neuronexmachina 6mo ago> The bottom line is in the past the US government has acquired weapons/tech with deals like "it will never be used for X purpose". However, as far as my research has shown, it has never accepted deal where said weapons or tech has self-policing features. Some examples of past US govt use of tech with self-policing features: * DJI drones have historically had geofencing around restricted areas (e.g. airports, DC). Back when the US govt used DJI drones, govt users had to get unlock licenses from DJI to be able to operate in those areas: https://support.dji.com/help/content?customId=en-us03400006732&spaceId=34 https://support.dji.com/help/content?customId=en-us034000067... * cloud computing features like Assured Workloads place firm guardrails on e.g. what regions services can be spun up in: https://cloud.google.com/security/products/assured-workloads https://cloud.google.com/security/products/assured-workloads * for ITAR compliance, software sold to the government will often have IP-based geofencing and lock down if it's run outside an authorized area * I'm pretty sure the US govt uses software that has licensing enforcement * This is sort of the opposite, but military technology exported by the US to other countries quite frequently has self-policing built in, e.g. geo-blocking of missiles and aircraft
- exabrial 6mo agoAren't all of your examples exactly the opposite of what I said?
- themafia 6mo agoHow about: The pentagon can have "AI" once it completes a single successful audit.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- khazhoux 6mo agoThat was a typo. The agreement is actually to use it for any awful use.
- triage8004 6mo agoAI going to be doing more lawful genocide in near future
- xbmcuser 6mo agoIf something can't be profitable charge it to the government for multiple times and make it profitable and let taxpayers ie the citizens hold the burden. I never thought I would see this scam outside a poor corrupt country but damn US is falling fast.