A Fight for Voting Rights and a Showdown over AI Warfare (with Eliza Sweren-Becker & Amos Toh)

Hello and welcome to the briefing, a weekly conversation with leaders and experts to

explore the ideas shaping our democracy today.

I'm Michael Waldman, President of the Brennan Center for Justice.

We know this week there is a lot going on, the war in the Middle East, the gas prices

soaring, the affordability crisis, the economic crisis that's brewing.

There's a lot to take in and a lot to handle.

And as part of all of that, but getting a little bit less attention than you might

otherwise expect, are two things I want to make sure you know about.

We are working on the Brennan Center that we want to make sure you know about.

One of them is that in the middle of all of this, despite everything that is going on,

President Donald Trump has said that the number one priority for Congress is passing no

not an authorization for his war, not an economic policy, but something called the Save Act.

You've heard about it from us before.

It's a restrictive voting bill.

We estimate that it would mean that at least 21 million people would lack the documents

of passport or a birth certificate effectively to be able to register and vote.

And he has said now that he will not sign any other legislation until he signs the Save

Act.

He's pressing really hard for this.

That's something that we want to discuss.

We want to understand the brewing fight in Congress.

We want to understand why this is such a bad idea, what's at stake, and what we think

is going to happen.

And to have that conversation, I'm going to be joined by my colleague Eliza Swerren Becker.

She's the deputy director of our Voting Rights and Elections program, an expert on so

many things having to do with our democracy.

The author of a brilliant article on the elections clause, I say that only partly because

she allowed me to co-author it with her, and much more.

And then we're going to talk about, in the second half of this conversation, something

you might have read about, which is the brewing fight over the role of artificial intelligence

AI in the war effort and in defense policy generally that has come to light with the fight

between the company anthropic and the Department of Defense.

The Brennan Center has a report that we've looked at for many, many months on this whole

issue of AI in defense.

And the author of that report, Amos Toe, will be joining me for the second half of this

conversation.

But I'm going to start with the SAVAC, and hope that I'm going to be able to do it without

steam coming out of my ears, Eliza, why in the middle of all of this is President Trump

pushing the SAVAC, which has already passed the House of Representatives and been blocked

in the Senate.

Well, the president has been focused for over a year on a campaign to undermine the midterm

elections.

This happened starting day one of his administration when he pardoned roughly 1,500 people who stormed

the Capitol violently, and it's been happening in the months since then.

This is just one element of a federal campaign to interfere with our elections, to undermine

confidence in our elections, and to stop people from participating in our elections.

And this bill, if it were to become law, would do that emphatically.

As I said, our research shows that what it does, which is basically what it says is you

have to have a passport or a birth certificate and present them physically to register each

time you register, 21 million people don't have ready access to those documents.

Actually, we'd affect a lot more people than that because married women who changed their

names, their name is different perhaps on their birth certificate than their voter registration

roles.

This bill passed the House and then was blocked in the Senate last year.

It passed the House again this year, and so far it is once again blocked.

The president devoted as much time in the state of the Union address to this as he did to

previewing the war in Iran, which is quite mind blowing, but he's also demanding that

the bill do even more.

What does he want to change in the legislation?

Well, as you said, the president is obsessed with the SAV Act.

He's obsessed with conspiracy theories about elections that he's been seeding for many

years.

The bill would, as you said, require a passport or a birth certificate to register to vote.

It would require voters to present those in person.

It would be a five alarm fire for American voters.

It would be the most restrictive voting bill, federal voting bill ever passed by Congress.

When the federal government gets involved, usually it's to try to promote voting rights not

always as much as it should.

This would be the worst voting bill anybody can think of.

Absolutely.

I mean, Congress historically has worked to protect the freedom to vote.

It has done that to stop states from discriminating against black voters and other voters of color.

It has done that to improve our systems of elections.

If Congress were to pass the SAV Act, to my mind, the first federal voter suppression bill

that I can think of, it would be turning its back on the history of Congress to protect

the freedom to vote and really be a new era of election law in this country.

So we're definitely against it.

We know that.

And he, in the state of the Union address, he chose the worst possible argument to make,

I think, to try to get any kind of, you know, buy in from people who are not already

in his space.

He said, we need to do this because cheating is rampant in effect by Democrats.

And it really mobilized the Democrats to stand up against it.

Yeah, I mean, the president has a history of saying the quiet part out loud.

He has said, essentially, that he wants to pass the SAV Act so he can ensure that Republicans

win elections.

So he literally said that at the Dural Gulf Club, this week, Monday of this week, when

the Republicans had their gathering, their strategy gathering, he said to reporters, oh,

we've have to pass this so the Republicans can win.

It's, you know, there's kind of a traditional definition of a gaff in politics, which is

when a politician accidentally speaks the truth.

And that would be an example of him, say, as you said, saying the quiet part out loud.

Now he wants to make the bill worse.

He wants to, first of all, they added other provisions to this proof of citizenship,

the passport, show your papers requirement.

They added voter ID requirements.

Now voter ID is all over the country already.

That is not the worst part of the bill, but they want to end, he's demanding that they

add more to end vote by mail, basically, which is widely popular with voters from all over

the country right now.

Yes.

I mean, the SAV Act now is essentially the SAV Act on steroids.

It has additional voter suppression policies than it had last year, for example.

It would also require states to turn over their sensitive voter rolls to this Department

of Homeland Security and state of it.

It's not always out, but Mark Wayne Mullin, famous election denier, an election denier,

mixed martial arts guy, but an election denier, he would now be the one getting all this

data.

And what they're doing is they're saying to states, we were wondering why they were trying

to hoover up all this data.

It's quite clear.

They want to actually force states to purge eligible voters from the rolls in the run-up

to the election.

It's clear that they're trying to meddle with voterless maintenance, which is a process

that states undertake, and states undertake that because Congress mandated that states

undertake that.

This is a role that states play to keep our voter rolls clean.

They have been doing it successfully.

We want the voter rolls to be people to be purged from the rolls, but not eligible voters.

And this would, we're not worried that Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck are going to get pushed

off the rolls, but that actual live human beings who have the right to vote would show up and

find out that they've lost their right to vote when they don't have really a meaningful

ability to do something about it.

So they're pushing the bill, they're trying to make it worse.

He has been urging the Senate to do its work in a different way than it has been doing

it to get this done.

Now, as you know, the filibuster has become very entrenched in how the Senate operates,

which means effectively, you need 60 votes to pass regular legislation like this.

Now they don't actually stand there and talk like Mr. Smith goes to Washington.

It's kind of an agreement that if you're going to not be able to get 60 votes, that they're

not going to make people hold the floor.

And we've actually, at the Brennan Senate, been very critical of the filibuster, and

I think it actually, in the long run, has been a bad thing for the country.

But that is the rule right now.

But what President Trump is demanding that the Senate do is go to what's called a talking

filibuster.

It might arguably not require a rules change in the Senate, but basically to make the

Democrats hold the floor, like in Mr. Smith goes to Washington, and actually do the filibuster

to prevent the bill from getting voted on and a majority vote.

But as Senator John Thune, the Republican leader, has said, be careful what you ask for,

is what would potentially be the consequence of that?

I mean, this would invite an old fashioned floor fight.

It means Democrats could hold the floor indefinitely.

They could introduce amendments on any subject, and they could prevent the president from pushing

his agenda forward in Congress altogether.

They could propose health care bills.

Sure.

They could propose affordability bills.

They could read the Epstein files on the floor of the Senate.

They could read the dictionary on the floor of the Senate.

They could read whatever they wanted to hold the floor.

And that is the kind of thing that used to happen back in the day when there were these

talking filibusters, but it really seeds control of the floor to the Democrats.

And it also takes a huge amount of time and means nothing else gets done.

No judges get confirmed.

We're still in the middle of a partial government shutdown with the Department of Homeland

Security not being funded.

And this is why John Thune, the Republican leader, has said, you know, I don't think this

is going to happen.

He's been quite thrown as much cold water on this as he can.

Senator Schumer has been very adamant.

He called this bill dead on arrival.

He said, if they bring this to a vote, we are going to do everything we have to.

But we do actually think this is likely to come to a vote, to a closer vote at the very

least at some point in the next week or two.

Is that right?

Yes.

I mean, that's what Senator Thune has said.

I mean, there are two things that are going on here.

One is that, as you said, the coin of the realm in the Senate is time.

And if the Republicans give up their control over the floor, that means the Democrats get

to decide how to use their time, that's a big risk for Republicans.

The other thing that's going on is actually the Savak is very unpopular.

Last year, as you said, the Savak passed the House.

And then it went over to the Senate and sat and sat and sat.

And nothing happened.

Hundreds of persons of people are contacting.

Exactly.

That's because there's huge public opposition.

People understand what the Savak would require, which is a passport or a birth certificate

to register to vote.

And that millions would be blocked from voting.

And there was a video last year about women in particular, the women whose names are changed,

that just went viral without much forethought on the part of people who were pounding the

table on this.

And people don't like their rights being taken away.

And they also want to know why, in heaven's name, is this the priority with everything

that's going on when they haven't had a vote yet on whether to authorize this extraordinary

military operation that's taking place, which we're going to talk about in a little bit.

So one thing everybody should know is there's going to be a big voting rights fight in the

Congress right now.

And we think it's really important that people speak up, that those citizens who don't like

this, who don't think this is the right thing to do, let Congress let the Senate know this.

Because it definitely has an impact.

Yes, absolutely.

And I would say call your senator no matter who they are.

Call your senator if you think they already support the Savak.

Call your senator if you know they already oppose the Savak.

Let your Senate offices know where you stand on the Savak and that you oppose it, because

hearing from constituents really matters.

And hearing from a volume of constituents, like we know they already have this year,

like we know they did last year, that matters.

You know, I will mention one thing, and then I want to talk about other ways that there's

been an attempt to undermine the election, a lesson that I hope those of us who care

about voting rights who want to improve and expand our elections can take from this, which

is, you know, this is the anniversary of the March and Selma, and in fact of when President

Lyndon Johnson went before Congress to propose the voting rights act, I write about this

in the briefing newsletter.

And that was when he said we shall overcome it was one of the great moments in American

history.

And Johnson really used all the powers of his office to expand voting rights.

Here Trump is using the powers of his office.

He's using the bully pulpit to try to restrict voting rights.

He's trying to undo that very progress, but pushing Congress to act as kooky as it may

seem in a setting like this is what presidents do.

And when I think about something like the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting

Rights Advancement Act, which were the key voting bills that were before Congress during

the Biden presidency, if that White House, if that president had put pressure on Congress

early and made it a priority, as Trump is, we would be living in a different democracy

today.

And I do hope that if there is a moment when we have a chance, once again, to talk about

to craft and to enact reforms, that we take the lesson that you really got to push hard

for it as outrageous to me and as absurd as it is to see this spectacle playing out.

It's also a reminder of what can really happen if you put your shoulder to the wheel.

Well, as you mentioned, I studied the elections clause and essentially what we know from

the Constitution is the president doesn't have any control over elections, but the president

does have a bully pulpit.

The president can tell Congress what his priorities are and it's a shame we didn't see Biden

before using that bully pulpit to call for passage of the Freedom to Vote Act and the

John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act.

But before the Voting Rights Act was passed, MLK Jr had an op-ed in the New York Times

calling voting rights civil right number one.

It's the right that protects all rights.

And if we could have the enthusiasm that LBJ showed for voting rights, for protecting the

Freedom to Vote coming out of the White House, I think we'd have a very different democracy

today and much more participation.

And of course, as we know, it was the leadership, the activism of people like Dr. King, the

courage of people like John Lewis and those marchers on the bridge at Selma putting their

bodies on the line and the televised impact of seeing the brutality that forced LBJ.

He was for voting rights, but he actually was forced by circumstances and by public

outcry to actually do what he did.

So it's always an interplay between activism and people in power.

But you mentioned the elections class.

So we'll talk about that for five or six hours as we can, but don't worry, we're not

really going to.

That's the provision of the Constitution that says states run elections.

This has an important legitimate role to set national laws.

We hope good laws.

Presidents have no role.

And so when we talk about the campaign that's been underway for a year to undermine the

elections, so much of it has actually been illegal or counter to the Constitution.

You've been very involved actually in the litigation and in studying what's going on.

So it's also one year since there was an executive order.

Now there were like 47 executive orders that day.

We talk about this executive order as though everybody knows about it, but actually there

were a lot.

So remind me, remind us what that executive order purported to do.

Absolutely.

So last March, the president issued an anti voting executive order.

The cornerstone of that executive order is actually the same cornerstone of the SAV Act,

which is a mandate that a little known election agency called the Election Assistance Commission

require people to submit a passport or a citizenship document to register to vote using

the federal form.

As I said, the president is obsessed with this policy and he's trying to get it done wherever

he can.

Other elements of the executive order attempt to enforce that mandate to require.

But it basically would have desertified all the voting machines.

Yes, it also ordered this same bipartisan independent agency over which the president does

not control to change the standards that are used to certify voting machines.

And that several states have built into their state law and opted into to apply.

It would it also mandated that DHS obtain and review all of the state voter rolls.

So we can see that DOJ is executing on that element of the executive order.

Let's stop there because we've talked about this a lot.

This is the federal government going to the states saying, give us these voter rolls

and not just the public stuff, social security numbers, private data, which they will then

use or abuse or misuse in some way.

And that also supposedly was in this executive order.

Now we always say these executive orders, you know, a lot of them are basically malevolent

press releases.

They don't have much power and he did not have the power to order this little independent

agency to do this.

But this is one example where the Brennan Center did something we don't always do, which

was we went to court.

And we actually sued and you were one of the lawyers on this case.

So take us into the courtroom, you know, with as much flair and drama as you can.

What happened in that litigation?

Well, as you said, the law is very clear.

The constitution doesn't give any power over federal elections to the president.

And so we figured in addition to our ordinary advocacy, this was a really good opportunity

to litigate because essentially it's a slam dunk and represent the legal women voters.

We represent the league of women voters and several other organizations that register

voters.

And we yes, we're co counsel with several other partner organizations.

And we went to court and said just that the president doesn't get to mandate rules

for federal elections.

The elections causes very clear that authority lies with states and then superseding authority

lies with Congress and no authority lies with the president.

And you don't have to be a lawyer to understand why the framers wrote the constitution because

they didn't want a king to give the president control over federal elections would essentially

give the president control over electing himself.

And we don't want that.

We don't want that now.

And we certainly didn't want that when the constitution was written.

And we got a final order on Halloween, as I remember, and it's being appealed.

But right now that we and others got this thing stopped.

But this is not the only step he's threatening other executive orders.

And he is using the Department of Justice in all kinds of inappropriate ways, including

trying to get states to turn over these voter records to the Department of Justice.

I think almost every state has gotten a demand of that kind.

11 states have gone along.

And again, we know that they're using it to try to specifically purge voters.

They're using the Department of Justice to terrorize election officials and to try to

cast doubt on the veracity of American elections.

We all saw the FBI raid in Fulton County, Georgia, the one where we're not Kristi, no, I

have to keep all these people straight.

We're Tulsi Gabbard was kind of lurking around and they couldn't figure out why she was

there.

And the Justice Department said, we think she was just in the neighborhood.

We have no idea.

She said, Oh, I was personally ordered to do it by President Trump.

And he said, I have no idea what this is and I'm against it.

And so she was part of this and her aspect of this scam seems to be to try to claim far

an interference in the elections.

But now we've learned that there's an FBI subpoena from Cash Patel's FBI in Arizona and

Maricopa County to try to get from the legislature their records from again from the 2020 elections.

There's this bizarre, backward looking conspiracy mongering that goes on.

And some of it is Trump's obsession.

He knew he lost, but he's probably at some point convinced himself he didn't, but it's

also to set the stage for sowing doubt, I think, in the next election.

It's not just about 2020, but it's about 2026.

This is something that's going to be fought over nonstop between now and November.

What do you think people watching us today, other than having a stiff drink or getting

their blood pressure medication or whatever?

What should they be doing?

Well, the first thing to do is to understand that states and localities actually run elections.

And in the vast, vast majority of cases, these are election officials that are working

very hard to make sure we have free and fair elections.

They are putting out correct information and they are trying to make sure that their

constituents can go out and vote.

So you should trust your state and local election officials and the information that they

are sharing with you.

They have been free and fair despite all the pressure, despite COVID, despite all the

lies, the threats of violence, the actual violence, the elections, if people think about

their own experience, were largely uneventful.

They weren't certainly accurate.

And the election officials are these unsung heroes.

I think people learn about them more and more, but we need to back them up.

We need to make sure that law enforcement works with them.

We need to make sure that governors and mayors and county officials and state attorneys

general stand up to protect the system.

And we also need to make sure everybody knows that this is a difficult time and that some

of the things that we're worried about haven't even happened yet.

You know, Steve Bannon said that he thought ICE should surround the polls.

That's something people really worry about.

I mean, that's flatly against the law.

It's prohibited and it would be criminal for federal troops to be at the polls or to

interfere with elections.

One thing I just want to go back to with respect to election officials being really American

heroes is that's perhaps the most perverse part of the SAV Act is that it attacks those

very election officials.

How's it do that?

It imposes a huge administrative burden on them with absolutely no federal funding and

it imposes new criminal and civil liability on those election officials, including if

they just make a mistake, even if the person that they get registered is, in fact, an eligible

American citizen.

So the very people who make our elections work who essentially allow us to have a functioning

democracy are subject to more attacks and less resources under the SAV Act.

So not only would this be a terrible bill for voters, it would also be a terrible bill

for election administration for election officials.

So that is another thing that people can do.

You ask what can people do?

Again, call your senators, tell them no on the SAV Act.

And out there in the real world, this is not a partisan issue nearly as much as it is

on Capitol Hill in the sense that quietly, a lot of state officials from the Republican

Party, from both parties, say, you know, this is how we run our elections.

We use vote by mail.

The elections are free and fair.

I like to always point out that the Secretary of State of Louisiana, in what I assume was an

earnest attempt to advance the MAGA cause, did a study of the voter rolls in Louisiana.

And that is a place, you know, with a kind of a fabled history of chicanery and elections.

The famous quote from the former governor there, Earl Long, who said, when I die, bury me

in Louisiana, I want to stay active in politics.

She looked at it and said, we've looked at 40 years.

And I think it was seven, we've identified maybe 79 people who we think might have been

non-citizens during those 40 years.

When tens of millions of votes were cast, it turned out she said rather quietly.

It's not actually a problem here.

Same thing in Utah.

Every time state officials from either party do a look at their own situation, they say,

well, actually, it's not a problem in our state.

Not only was it the same thing in Utah, they found zero non-citizens who voted in Utah

and the lieutenant governor of Utah, who is the chief election official in that state,

was herself misidentified as a non-citizen because she was born abroad in a military

family.

So things may be wrong when relying on, for example, federal citizenship information

that the states are comparing their data to.

And in any event, it's vast over estimates of any errors that are on the roles because

we know that, for example, this data doesn't always account for people who have been naturalized

and who are eligible American citizens who are registered to vote.

So we're going to keep working on this.

People need to speak out, let your senator and member of Congress know I'm going to

go out on a limb and say that I think I remember the phone number for Congress, which used

to be 2-0222-4-3121.

Very impressive.

If that's not true, we'll bleep it out and put some other number in.

This is a week when our voices matter a lot.

People should make a plan to vote.

They should know that it's illegal for troops, for ICE, to harass people.

But we all know there's a lot of rumors and scared people out there.

And we all need to band together to stand up for voters, to stand up for communities.

And we at the Brennan Center are going to do our part to keep fighting in the courts,

in the Court of Public Opinion, and exposing what's going on.

And we will be seeing what happens in Congress in the next week or two history is being made

one way or the other.

Eliza Swerenbecker, thank you so very much for what you do and for educating us and keeping

us up to date.

Now I'm going to have the chance to talk with my colleague, Amos Tau.

He is a senior counsel here at the Brennan Center in our Liberty and National Security

Program.

He's the author of a new report out yesterday called the Business of Military AI, a very

topical topic, a timely topic.

One of the reasons that we, this is on the minds of many of us, even those who have not

been looking at it, is of course that there's been, first of all, the war going on.

We've learned that in Venezuela, that AI was very much used by the military in its operation

there.

It is part of what's going on and part of what's being used right now in the Middle East.

And there was a very high profile and continues to be a high profile dispute, contract dispute,

and now lawsuit between the Anthropic Company, which is the company that makes or developed

Claude, a very, very popular AI program, which is the fastest growing AI program, and

the Defense Department over the terms of that contract.

And in fact, how the military can and cannot should and should not be able to use AI.

And so Amos, thank you for being part of this, and one, you worked on this for a long

time.

You're really knowledgeable about it.

One very basic question is should this set of questions about AI and the military, should

this be the topic of just a contract dispute, or is it something bigger and something deeper?

It is definitely something that requires democratic control and democratic decision making.

It shouldn't just be left to the hands of private companies and in contract disputes.

That's why we've been calling on Congress to act given what's going on in Iran and what

happened in Venezuela, and now what's happening with the contract dispute.

In other words, this is a very big issue for the country, for how we govern ourselves,

for how the incredible power of AI can be used for good or for ill.

And it's something that actually we think demands public debate and congressional action.

So let's sort of take the lens back a little bit.

I want to ask you to define AI, because that's probably too broad, but what does it mean

in the context of military use, and how widespread is military use of AI?

So I would say that the Pentagon has defined AI quite simply, that it is technology that

can be used as a substitute for tasks that require human intelligence.

And essentially, the way that the Pentagon has invested in AI is what we found to be

in two ways.

First, it has been increasingly fielding this technology to conduct surveillance, intelligence

analysis, and targeting.

So what you're seeing, for example, in the strikes in Iran, is the fruition of some

of those efforts.

And we are also increasingly seeing the use of AI in building out autonomous weapons.

The Pentagon has been under quite immense pressure to keep up with rapid adoption of

small drone warfare, as illustrated in the Ukraine war.

And so it's increasingly trying to field fleets of drones that are able to conduct that

kind of warfare.

And interestingly, President Zelensky of Ukraine gave a speech, I believe, at the United

Nations, where he said he thought it was extraordinarily important that there be public control

and actually negotiations over the use of drones, the use of autonomous weaponry.

Because, first of all, he saw how powerful it was, how, in an asymmetric way, a smaller

country could really make extraordinary progress in the use of those weapons.

But how dangerous it could be, too, he said he thought it was more dangerous than nuclear

weapons, in part, because you could have nuclear weapons deployed in that way.

It was a real cry for a public understanding of not just the G-Wiz, or look at this cool

technology, but understanding that as with any technology, there needs to be a public

set of guardrails, a public set of values, and that is important to do, even if the people

pushing the technology don't love it.

So I want to go a little deeper.

You mentioned the surveillance, and you mentioned the use of this in targeting.

For somebody who isn't versed in this, who says, well, human beings make mistakes, too,

why isn't it better to have targeting, say, in a war done by AI rather than a person?

So I think some tasks that humans are doing, and actually better able to do, technology

can do as well, even the most advanced forms of technology.

So in 2024, it was reported that the Maven algorithms, essentially the system that is

being used in the strikes in Iran, lacked accuracy when it came to identifying tanks,

and it was 60% off the time, it could accurately identify a tank in good weather, and then

that degraded to 30% in snowy conditions, whereas soldiers were effectively identifying

tanks accurately 84% of the time, and then there are ways in which AI is being used that

are simply beyond its technical capacities.

So if you apply AI and facial recognition, for example, to images that are too dimly

lit or where people's faces are obscured or incredibly grainy, that's not something humans

can actually make out to discover the identity of that person, but it's also something that

AI can't do simply because the image is degraded to such an extent where it's not possible.

So I think when you layer that kind of inaccuracy on top of the fact that a lot of the time

when you put humans in the loop and have humans kind of checking these mistakes and errors,

they still tend to believe that the AI is more objective and more accurate because this

is something that a presumably objective technology has told you is accurate.

Because with AI, of course, so often we don't actually, it's hard to look under the hood

because even the people who are the engineers or others who create it can't entirely tell you

what's gone into it or why it's saying what it's saying, and if you think about the hallucinations

that we're all used to, but it is the case too that the track record in recent weeks has shown

some considerable success, and so it does seem like this is going to be a bigger and bigger part

of how wars are fought, how militaries operate around the world, and both in terms of

protecting the lives of American troops, which is extraordinarily important, but just the

competition among countries. And what's so striking to me in the fight between Anthropic,

whose software has been used as part of this through Claude and other things,

and the Defense Department, is it really boils down to two issues that are issues that you've written

are things that are public in their nature. One of them is the autonomous weapons and the targeting

and the use of autonomous weapons without any human involvement. That's one of the objections

that Anthropic had. The other one has to do with what it says was the planned use or the potential

use of their software for domestic surveillance. So let's start with the autonomous weapons.

Is that in fact something that they're right about? Is that something that we expect to happen

that's happening already? Yeah, I think that's happening already. I think fully autonomous weapons,

right, weapons that actually have no human involvement between the identification of a target

and firing is already playing out in conflict zones. So if you think about defensive, purely

defensive capabilities, right, like a classic example would be like the Iron Dome system.

Like that kind of shoots at missiles and coming missiles. It has to be done.

Yeah, so that is an example that maybe, you know, fairly unobjectionable. I think what we are

really worried about is the use of kind of offensive weapons and offensive capabilities that is

mobilized to fire on underground, you know, possibly human targets without any involvement between

identification and firing. And that's where we think the risk of failure can be catastrophic

and really lead to excessive civilian harm. And so in terms of what should be done about

that issue about the autonomous weapons, either through Congress or some other means, what kinds

of guardrails are you urging? Are we urging to be put in place? And who should do that?

Right, so I think like the first thing to know about AI is that it requires so much data

to train, to run on, to operate, to analyze. And the way that Congress can really meaningfully

restrict the development of a technology that protects privacy is to impose privacy protections

to actually rein in the data collection and analysis by not just the military, but also other

intelligence agencies. So for example, we've called on Congress to pass the Fourth Amendment is

not for CLAC, which would essentially restrict the government's purchases of commercial

commercial sensitive data that they would otherwise need a warrant.

And this goes to the other thing that anthropic was saying that they were concerned about, which was

the use of this technology for domestic surveillance. And you just, the bill has the Fourth Amendment

in the title, but I think a lot of people don't realize that the Fourth Amendment applies when

a police officer is doing a search, but there is so much data for sale out there in the marketplace

that every company buys and permeates the whole economy. And that in a way, you can get the same

information without worrying about the Fourth Amendment if you just go buy a commercial program.

A lot of people would hear this and say, well, if it's already out there, what's the problem?

I mean, how realistic is it to stop government from getting this information if the bad guys can

get it or if I can get it when I'm using my credit card to buy the information?

Well, so I think the first thing to know is that that actually potentially violates the spirit

of Supreme Court precedent that indicates that the government must actually get a warrant or

court order in order to access, you know, cell phone location records that is collected by commercial

parties. And this is how one of the ways the Supreme Court has tried to catch up with the 21st

century as these justices scratch their heads and figure out like what a cell phone is,

fun, what how the internet works, and that kind of thing. It can be a little painful to watch

them do it. But whenever there's been a new technology, telephones, telegraphs, there has to be

a period where you adopt the principles of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to those new

technologies. That's not really actually a new thing. It's happened many other times in our

history, even with something as breathtakingly new as AI. Yeah, even with something as new as AI,

I would say it's an evolution, not a revolution, right? It's increasing amounts of data that is being

used to train the technology and making it more and more granular in its analysis of other forms of

data. And so the legislation you described is this a partisan issue on Capitol Hill or is this

something that people from both parties are getting riled up about? I think that there is kind of

bipartisan momentum for this, but it's just not kind of gotten over the finish line in part because

of objections from national security and intelligence agencies. And increasingly the spending of

tech companies in elections, which the New York Times wrote about in the last week and a lot of

other evidence that companies that had not actually been particularly involved in the campaign

money game are now getting very involved because they see that they can get a big payoff,

big return, payout, whatever. No, for not that much money in the large scheme of things.

So there's legislation. Does Congress have the technological savvy to even understand what the

issues are? So I think that that's sadly lacking, right? I think a lot of Congress relies on

sometimes like industry funded experts, but even beyond that, there's very limited resources

that Congress has to understand how rapidly this technology is evolving. And it has not as a result,

like grappled with the ways that AI is actually amplifying surveillance. We're not just talking

about collecting data, right? It's running AI on top of the data being collected.

Because there's so much data everywhere, but it's not that useful unless you have the AI to kind of

put it in the food processor and turn it into something that can be used in that way.

Yes. And so that's the legislative agenda. And as we all know that AI is going to be a bigger and

bigger issue. People are worried about job loss. They're worried about energy prices and all these

other things. This is part of the agenda for how we as a society bring human values into this

new technology. The other question though is this is this fight between Anthropic and the

Defense Department. Because if the Defense Department, which has designated this company,

which makes the software that they just used to launch the war in Iran as a supply chain risk

and as a national security threat, it's an extraordinary ratcheting upward of the authoritarian

use of government to bully a private company. At least that's what Anthropic argues.

Other people say, well, it really shouldn't be up to a company to say whether there's

how the Defense Department, how the taxpayers, how the government should do its work. Why should a

company have the ability to make those decisions? Well, the company is essentially party to a contract

of the government. And within the context of their contract, it can impose restrictions that it

says it's policy and the government can choose to accept or reject them. No, they don't have to

contract with them. Yes. So, you know, the Department certainly does not have to contract with them,

but to go over and above that and to designate their message supply chain risk and shut them

out of the defense contracting completely is a way to kind of send a signal to other companies.

They actually chills, right? They are exercise of First Amendment rights because it essentially

is a way to pressure these companies and say, you know, we are not going to buy technology unless

you let us use it, however we see fit. So, I think like that is kind of the central problem and the

central abuse that we are seeing. And there is a lawsuit that has just been filed and no doubt this

will play out in coming days in the courts, but not just in the courts. Amos, thank you for

giving us so much thought for bringing your expertise to bear on this. The report has been in

the works for a long time, but the urgent currency of it and the news every day is making

clearer than ever. This is a really important topic. So, thank you so much for educating us

and for being on top of this. And I want to add just a thought or two about where this all fits

into the Brennan Center's work, but really the broader task for our country. As I said,

this in a way is not the first time that we've faced issues like this. Whenever there is new

technology, it upends the law. It can upend settled relations. It can change things very rapidly.

And it can take society, government, the political process, time to catch up. It happened with

railroads. So much of the law that we have in our country comes out of the changes in the law

that were made in the 1870s and 80s and 90s to deal with this new phenomenon of national

corporations, but especially railroads that linked us together. We saw the need to apply

the Fourth Amendment, the First Amendment, all the elements of the Bill of Rights to new communications

technologies as they developed all across the 20th century is television covered by the First

Amendment. It is radio covered by the First Amendment. What about a broadcast license station

when there were only a few licenses given out? Did that have a different set of rules? Back then,

the answer was yes, the internet and so on. And so even though AI looks astonishing, looks dazzling,

looks like it may be a societal change that will transform the economy. Is it as big a deal as the

Gutenberg press or is it just yet another disruptive technology? Those are things we don't know yet.

But what we do know is that government and the law need to catch up. And it's not just a matter

of saying, oh, wow, this is really cool. Oh, we don't want to slow this down. Oh, we don't want to,

we don't want to block the development of this really, really important technology. At every step

of the way, it's important to apply basic constitutional principles, basic human values, and to

understand that we need to control the technology, if we don't want the technology to control us.

That's certainly true in the context of the use in the military, where there's so much risk

to property, to lives, to societies, of something that can get out of control. And we're seeing it

happen with extraordinary speed. We saw it in the battlefields of Ukraine, how fast that changed.

We're seeing it now. And if we think that the United States is going to have a monopoly on the

use of AI in weaponry, certainly, that's not going to be the case. So we need to get our arms

around this, not just as a domestic society, but as President Zelensky said, as a world community,

or it's going to be something we're going to regret a great deal. As we heard earlier in our

conversation, in the first part of this, with our colleague Eliza Swerenbecker, there's a lot

happening. There's a lot happening every minute of every day. We think that these kinds of issues

are what we ought to be talking about. It is an important thing to understand about this war.

And the fact that we are spending time in Congress instead grappling with this egregious voter

restriction bill that would kick millions of people off the rolls, instead of dealing with these

big issues around the authorization for these military hostilities around energy,

around the economy, around affordability, around all the things that are actually the important

things that our society ought to be grappling with, that just shows the degree I would suggest

that our politics are out of whack. This is going to be not just an election about the attack on

democracy and voting, but an election in a lot of different ways around AI. People talk about

in 2026 or maybe 2028, when somebody comes up with a coherent public platform to address people's

concerns about this technology, that is already unnerving to people. It is going to be extraordinarily

potent politically. This has to be part of it. We're going to keep on it. We're going to keep

paying attention to it and let you know about it here at the Brennan Center for Justice.

If you enjoyed this conversation in this very busy week in March 2026, putting us in the very

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