My latest for @brennancenter.org on why the Trump admin’s moves on AI and cybersecurity confound rather than clarify. Ban on foreign access to Claude’s most advanced models underscores the challenges of governing when the admin’s instincts are anti-regulatory: www.brennancenter.org/our-work/ana...

Trump’s Chaotic AI and Cybersecurity Policy

The administration’s gutting of agencies, contradictory impulses on regulating AI, and susceptibility to outside interests undermine trust in its capacity to oversee artificial intelligence risks.

brennancenter.org

It is now crystal clear who is obstructing reauthorization. Cornyn & other reform opponents would rather see Sec. 702 expire than allow reforms to protect Americans’ privacy. Sen. Wyden offered an easy path forward for extending the law. Reform opponents would prefer sunset. 2/2

Senator Cornyn just blocked a 9-month extension of Section 702 with a warrant requirement for backdoor searches. He then blocked a 5-week extension with no warrant requirement, just basic transparency measures. 1/2

In the guise of an AI powered truth tribunal, Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan are backing a new platform to supercharge attacks on the press and promote "justice" without judges or juries. Don't buy it: www.codastory.com/polarization...

Peter Thiel is building a parallel justice system — Powered by AI - Coda Story

His investment in Objection.ai points to a new model: private investigations, AI verdicts, and accountability mechanisms that operate outside democratic institutions.

codastory.com

The risks of military AI "are already existential," says @amostoh.bsky.social -- "both for civilians swept up in the violence and destruction of AI-enabled wars and troops that have to live with the consequences of potentially unsafe weapons they can’t control.” theintercept.com/2026/05/01/e...

Musk Warns of Killer AI — While He and the Rest of Silicon Valley Cash In on AI That Kills

In his lawsuit against OpenAI, Elon Musk evoked a “Terminator” scenario. He said nothing about the people AI is already killing.

theintercept.com

What happens when the US military races to implement AI in war? I spoke with @amostoh.bsky.social, senior counsel at the @brennancenter.org, about what really goes on in these massive, secretive US military-tech contracts. Listen to the conversation here: www.themaybe.org/podcast/comp...

Computer Says Kill: A License for Unlimited War w/ Amos Toh

Who’s in control of calling the shots on AI in war— the military or the tech companies that they’re licensing their tech from?

themaybe.org

@theinformation.com just revealed key details of Google’s deal with the Pentagon to deploy Gemini in warfare. Charlie Bullock and I explain how loopholes in the deal pave the way for Gemini’s use in mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons - Google’s supposed red lines.

The Information@theinformation.com · 3mo ago

Exclusive: Google and the Department of Defense signed a deal allowing the Pentagon to use Google’s AI models on classified work. More details: https://thein.fo/3QAoTp2

critical intervention from @stevenfeldstein.bsky.social, on how Big Tech is resetting the terms of warfare. Steve foreshadowed the use of "good enough" drones as geopolitical chips - and look at where we are now foreignpolicy.com/2025/11/17/d...

‘Good Enough’ Drones Have Become Geopolitical Chips

In Sudan and elsewhere, regional powers have used the weapons for leverage.

foreignpolicy.com

Steve Feldstein@stevefeldstein.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Bytes & Bullets is available September 8 wherever books are sold. Pre-order yours now! 👇👇 www.amazon.com/Bytes-Bullet...

"The Capture of the Congressional Intelligence Committees" is forthcoming from the UC Irvine Law Review! It argues that Congress's intelligence oversight committees have become the intelligence community's biggest boosters on Capitol Hill. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Very excited to share the cover of my forthcoming book, OUTED: LBJ’S CONFIDANT AND THE ARREST THAT TRANSFORMED A PRESIDENCY. Coming October 13 from University of Chicago Press! press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

SCOTUS may well affirm the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship. But how we got to the point where this is even up for debate speaks volumes about the Supreme Court’s failures. Must-read 🧵 from @tomtmwolf.bsky.social 👇

Tom “T.M.” Wolf@tomtmwolf.bsky.social · 4mo ago

1. SCOTUS is going to have a hard time ruling for Trump on birthright. He did himself no favors today. 2. Our birthright citizenship rule is a universal one, designed to prevent Trump from doing what he's trying to do now -- deciding who's American and who isn't. 3. SCOTUS? Still a major problem.🧵

Glad to see you quoted @amostoh.bsky.social, but there shd be more emphasis on the fact that the tech elites placing the bets worked hard to make them pay off. It's not just a bet, it was an aim, enaced with millions of $s in lobbying & shaping policy over a decade. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Amos Toh@amostoh.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Illuminating story from @sheeraf.bsky.social @nytimes.com, situating the Iran war in Silicon Valley’s decade-long push to transform warfare. Who stands to lose the most when industry bets big on war? Civilians and taxpayers. @brennancenter.org explains why: www.brennancenter.org/our-work/res...

A clear-eyed rebuke of executive overreach and a decisive victory for the First Amendment. But the administration shows no signs of stopping its crusade against "woke AI," the data brokers' loophole is still wide open, and thousands are dying or displaced in an AI-fueled war. Where is Congress?

Justin Hendrix@justinhendrix.bsky.social · 4mo ago

"A federal judge in San Francisco blocked a Pentagon order Thursday labeling artificial intelligence company Anthropic a national security risk, saying officials had likely violated the law and retaliated against the firm for speaking publicly about how it wanted its technology to be used."

We at @brennancenter.org found that Palantir’s defense revenue surged over the last decade. 2025 was their most profitable year ever. Numbers can mislead. But sometimes they just don’t lie. www.brennancenter.org/our-work/res...

Kevin J. Kircher@kevinjkircher.com · 5mo ago

How Palantir, not Anthropic, led US bombs to kill 175 civilians, mostly 7-12yo girls, in a school in Minab, Iran on Feb 28. How embedding automation - not LLMs in this case, just image processing and sensor fusion - in military workflows mutes human judgment, causes errors, & diverts accountability.

Great post, particularly around the concept of “decision.” Decision has been used to describe what computers do going back at least to Shannon? And now it’s slipping to suggest that if an LLM makes a “decision” then a human has not. But a human is still making a decision about how to decide.

”debased” (adj.): 👇

Zoe Tillman@zoetillman.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Overnight: The Trump administration is making a renewed push to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia, telling a judge they've sorted out logistics to send him to Liberia (and rejected his proposal to go to Costa Rica) assets.bwbx.io/documents/us...

Illuminating story from @sheeraf.bsky.social @nytimes.com, situating the Iran war in Silicon Valley’s decade-long push to transform warfare. Who stands to lose the most when industry bets big on war? Civilians and taxpayers. @brennancenter.org explains why: www.brennancenter.org/our-work/res...

Silicon Valley Bet on War. The Bets Are Paying Off.

nytimes.com

The Dept. of Defense's headlong rush to adopt AI means overreliance on just a handful of tech companies and weak oversight, says the Brennan Center's @amostoh.bsky.social.

Silicon Valley Bet on War. The Bets Are Paying Off.

nytimes.com

This is an incredibly valuable report and I recommend everyone read it and get a primer on how far down the rabbit hole of AI warfare we've traveled so far.

Amos Toh@amostoh.bsky.social · 5mo ago

1/ As the US continues AI-enabled strikes on Iran, new @brennancenter.org research from @emileayoub.bsky.social and me examines how the military’s investments in the technology have been building to this moment. Congress must step up and reckon with AI’s dangers to life, liberty, and democracy 🧵:

Note how the AI "recommendations" are completely obscured with little to no ability to actually verify or trace their outputs. This is what we mean when we say the distinctions between DSS and AWS are superficial in practice, especially when operators are given seconds to approve.

OSINTRadar@osintradar.bsky.social · 5mo ago

🇺🇸⚡️🇮🇷— The Pentagon uses Palantir’s AI system, Maven, when planning strikes on Iran. Commanders select a target, the system suggests the best munitions, and a live feed shows the strike in real time.

As @amostoh.bsky.social and I explain in our new report, the military has been ramping up its adoption of AI, while oversight and safeguards have failed to keep up. But the Pentagon’s dispute with Anthropic has brought a grave threat into focus: using AI to pry into Americans’ private lives 🧵 1/

The Business of Military AI

The Pentagon has been spending tens of billions of dollars to adopt new technologies at breakneck speed. Without oversight and safeguards, military applications of artificial intelligence could jeopar...

brennancenter.org

Both things can be true: The Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic is an abuse of executive power. The daylight between the Pentagon and Anthropic is less than you think. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/01/t...

Senator Ron Wyden@wyden.senate.gov · 5mo ago

I've long been sounding the alarm on Section 702 of FISA, and secret, legal loopholes the government uses to spy on Americans. The program is up for reauthorization in April and I'll be fighting like hell to make sure the current program doesn’t get rubber stamped.

All this talk of advanced AI targeting and the U.S. still fired a Tomahawk at an elementary school where an outdoor playground has been visible on Google Maps since 2017 www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

Iranian school was on U.S. target list, may have been mistaken as military site

The strike on an Iranian elementary school killed at least 175, many of them children, raising questions as to whether the military’s use of AI-enabled targeting was a factor.

washingtonpost.com

1/ As the US continues AI-enabled strikes on Iran, new @brennancenter.org research from @emileayoub.bsky.social and me examines how the military’s investments in the technology have been building to this moment. Congress must step up and reckon with AI’s dangers to life, liberty, and democracy 🧵:

The Business of Military AI

The Pentagon has been spending tens of billions of dollars to adopt new technologies at breakneck speed. Without oversight and safeguards, military applications of artificial intelligence could jeopar...

brennancenter.org

Emile Ayoub and Amos Toh: Senior Counsels, Liberty and National Security Program, Brennan Center for Justice ( @emileayoub.bsky.social and @amostoh.bsky.social):

In this Tech Policy piece, I criticize how framings of Anthropic’s & OpenAI’s negotiations with the US’s DoW overindex on myopic interpretations of human oversight, papering over what should be the real target of our scrutiny: that generative AI algorithms are a flawed and inaccurate technology.

Tech Policy Press@techpolicypress.bsky.social · 5mo ago

The expanding war in Iran brought to the fore questions about the role of technology in armed conflict, including the controversial use of new artificial intelligence technologies. Tech Policy Press invited perspectives from experts on what they are watching for as the situation unfolds.

The expanding war in Iran brought to the fore questions about the role of technology in armed conflict, including the controversial use of new artificial intelligence technologies. Tech Policy Press invited perspectives from experts on what they are watching for as the situation unfolds.

Key Questions on the Role of Technology in the Expanding Middle East War

Tech Policy Press asked experts working at the intersection of technology policy, security, and international affairs to share what they are watching.

buff.ly

As @amostoh.bsky.social and I explain, the Pentagon's dispute with Anthropic should not distract from the broader crisis at hand: Congress's failure to regulate some of the riskiest uses of AI - namely, amplifying surveillance and automating the use of lethal force.

Justin Hendrix@justinhendrix.bsky.social · 5mo ago

The expanding war in Iran brought to the fore questions about the role of technology in armed conflict, including the controversial use of new artificial intelligence technologies. Tech Policy Press invited perspectives from experts on what they are watching for as the situation unfolds.

Important 🧵on how the military’s use of Claude and other agentic AI could blow open the data broker loophole. @emileayoub.bsky.social, @jlkoepke.bsky.social and @jakelaperruque.bsky.social are all experts on this - follow them!

Emile Ayoub@emileayoub.bsky.social · 5mo ago

NYT’s reporting on the DOD-Anthropic dispute sheds more light on how the Pentagon planned to use Claude for mass surveillance of Americans: by collecting and analyzing commercial bulk data. So what is this commercial data? And how might Claude be used to collect and analyze it? 🧵 1/

Trump's "massive and ongoing operation" against Iran is a clear violation of the Constitution's separation of powers. In our democracy, the president does not have the kingly power to plunge the nation into war without democratic debate and sanction. /1 www.brennancenter.org/our-work/ana...

Trump's Iran Strikes Are Unconstitutional

Congress must act.

brennancenter.org