Today's Poll Question: Is it good or bad that the Pentagon is using A.I.?

You ready to vote on today's daily poll question at smirkconnish.com, but first Michael explains

it for you right here. Welcome to the smirkconnish podcast from Sirius XM for independent minds.

Hey gang, today is Friday. It's the 6th of March, 2026. Here's the poll question. On balance,

is it good or bad news that the Pentagon is using artificial intelligence on balance?

Is it good or bad news that the Pentagon is using artificial intelligence? Yesterday,

I initiated a new feature in the newsletter that I think I'm going to continue with. And that's

me just informally weighing in with some thoughts on the news of the day. And my final thought yesterday

was just one line. This will tell you how I'm voting today. I said, the only thing worse than the

Pentagon using artificial intelligence is the Pentagon not using AI. Yesterday, we had a lot of

voting and a lopsided result who should determine media access to the dignified transfer of remains

at Dover. Overwhelmingly, people said, well, the families of the fallen should make that call

not the media. And by the way, that is the standard. We went through a whole period and I explained

this yesterday where there was a media blackout. And it's amazing because, you know, thousands

died in the war on terror. And when their remains came home, the media were never there because

there was a ban, a ban that that went through the administrations of HW Clinton and W. And then

it was president Obama who removed it. And now I like the policy they have, which is it's up to the

families. It's their day. And I think that's the right call. This were punished podcast from

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And leave a rating and review of this podcast on your favorite podcast app on balance.

Is it good or bad news that the Pentagon is using artificial intelligence? Good

backgrounder from the Washington Post because when I discussed this on radio yesterday,

we were saying, well, exactly how is it being used in Iran? Okay, here's an illustration.

In order to strike a blistering thousand targets in the first 24 hours of its attack on Iran,

the US military leveraged the most advanced artificial intelligence it's ever used in warfare.

A tool that could be difficult for the Pentagon to give up even as it severed ties with the

company that created it. The military's Maven smart system, which is built by data mining company

Palantir is generating insights from an astonishing amount of classified data from satellites,

surveillance and other intelligence helping provide real-time targeting and target prioritization

to military operations in Iran, according to people familiar with the system.

It's embedded into the system with Anthropics AI tool Claude, a technology that was banned by

the Pentagon last week after heated negotiations over the terms of its use in war. So we talked

about this yesterday with a special guest, Michael Horowitz, Professor Horowitz from the University

of Pennsylvania. Claude was used in countering terror plots and in that raid that captured

Nicholas Maduro in Venezuela. But now Anthropic is on the outs with the Trump administration and who

or what is filling the void that would be ChatGPT. I mean, the major players in AI and

Anthropic, which has Claude, ChatGPT, Altman, which is controlled by OpenAI. Google Gemini is

another of them. Metta is another Google Deep Mind OpenAI. So I thought, well, this will be

interesting. Not learning from my lesson of yesterday, if you listen to the radio program or the

podcast, I thought, okay, Anthropic is now on the outs. And the president released a statement

about Anthropic. Let me just see if I can put my fingers on this. Yeah, I'll just pick it up

after, well, no, here's how it begins. The United States of America will never allow a radical

left woke company to dictate how our great military fights and wins wars. And then further along,

therefore, I'm directing every federal agency in the United States government to immediately cease

all use of Anthropics technology. So I went to Anthropic and I asked Anthropic, please explain

to me why Anthropic and the Pentagon has recently been in the news. What's this controversy

all about? What was Anthropics response? I don't have real-time access to news articles.

That's what they said to me. So I went to ChatGPT because now they're the new game in town,

and I asked ChatGPT the same question. Here's a good answer. The controversy you're seeing in

the news is essentially a high stakes fight over who controls how artificial intelligence can be

used in warfare. The US military or the AI companies building technology. I mentioned that yesterday

on the program, we had Michael Horowitz. By the way, one of the thing, people are now leaving.

Many are leaving ChatGPT because, you know, they perceive, this is from Forbes. They perceive

Anthropic having a fallout with the administration as being a good thing like, hey, I'm going to leave

ChatGPT and go to Anthropic. Quote, open AI's decision to let the US Department of Defense deploy

the company's AI models and its classified network has created a backlash. Many users are

reportedly leaving ChatGPT and switching to Anthropics Clawed instead following Anthropics

refusal to give the US government unrestricted access to its models.

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Michael Horowitz is the director of Perry Worldhouse and the Richard Perry professor at Penn,

also a senior fellow for technology and innovation on the council and foreign relations.

And yesterday was a guest on the program and I asked him for some background in terms of

how it had been used, how artificial intelligence by Anthropic had been used.

How was artificial intelligence provided by Anthropic used in the Maduro raid as far as we know?

We don't we don't know for sure but what we can what we can glean from publicly available sources

is that the Maduro all of America's combatant commands which are different regions of the world where

there's a one US military leader, one general or admiral who's in charge. They all have access

to a platform called Maven Smart System which is run by Palantir and fuses together lots of

different sources of information. Think data from satellites and data from human intelligence sources

and like data from like the slap of the internet like et cetera, et cetera.

One of the inputs into that now is Claude. And the Claude was like as far as we know,

probably doing maybe doing everything from like helping American leaders involved in the

in the operation like understand what the chatter looked like in Venezuela while the operation

was going on to maybe doing some simulations of what possible outcomes would would look like.

But we generally, well, we don't know for sure. The thing that I'm extremely confident about

is it was not used for any kind of autonomous targeting or warfare.

Again, Michael Horowitz from Penn got a PhD from Harvard, a BA from Emory University

and is expert in these matters and has worked at the Pentagon. He served as deputy assistant

secretary of defense for force development and the emerging capabilities and director of

emerging capabilities policy office. I also asked him to tell me, okay, like wherein lies

the controversy? What exactly was the issue here relative to mass surveillance and whether

machines would make decisions instead of humans? Here's what he said. What I've read is mass

surveillance that andthropic was had concerns in terms of how their technology would be used for

that purpose, but also autonomous weapons, meaning where a human wasn't involved, they were concerned

about that technology too. Can you help me understand and explain that?

Sure. On the mass surveillance side, the concern is that just like artificial intelligence can

help process information much faster like pull the signal out from the from the noise,

there's been concern that with large de-anonymized data sets that LLM tools like Claude could be used

essentially to de-anonymize them, giving the government information about us that they otherwise

shouldn't have. I'll be honest, I worry about that a lot more from other government agencies than

I do from the Pentagon, but that could just be me. On the autonomous weapon side,

I think an important thing to understand here is that people really underestimate the degree of

autonomy that's already in weapon systems. The Pentagon's been using autonomous weapon systems

like basically for 40 years, things like radar-guided missiles, like the closing weapon systems that

defend ships. What Anthropic was saying was not that they had a philosophical objection to autonomous

weapons. What they were saying is that large language models are not ready for prime time,

but that task and shouldn't be used for it. And frankly, as the person that helped draft the

Pentagon's policy on autonomous weapons systems, they're absolutely right about that. You would use

a deterministic algorithm, like an old school kind of algorithm to do something like that,

trained on a very specific data set like Chinese fighters or Russian tanks, not like Claude

trained on the internet. He's the man. He's the expert. He gets it. He helped draft the Pentagon's

policy, as he said, on autonomous weapons. I stand where I began, which is to say the only

thing worse than the Pentagon using AI is the Pentagon not using AI, but I want to hear from you.

Every day in posting on my YouTube page, okay? Go vote at smirconnish.com on today's poll question.

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