Hey there, and welcome to Decoder! I’m Hayden Discipline, senior AI repoter at The Verge — and your Thursday episode visitor host. I’ve one other couple of exhibits for you whereas Nilay is out on parental go away, and we’re going to be spending extra time diving into a number of the unexpected penalties of the generative AI growth.
As we speak, I’m speaking with Heidy Khlaaf, who’s chief AI scientist on the AI Now Institute and one of many trade’s main consultants within the security of AI inside autonomous weapons methods. Heidy has truly labored with OpenAI up to now; from late 2020 to mid-2021, she was a senior methods security engineer for the corporate throughout a essential time, when it was creating security and danger evaluation frameworks for the corporate’s Codex coding software.
Now, the identical corporations which have beforehand appeared to champion security and ethics of their mission statements are actually actively promoting and creating new expertise for navy purposes.
In 2024, OpenAI removed a ban on “navy and warfare” use circumstances from its phrases of service. Since then, the corporate has signed a cope with autonomous weapons maker Anduril and, this previous June, signed a $200 million Division of Protection contract.
OpenAI shouldn’t be alone. Anthropic, which has a popularity as some of the safety-oriented AI labs, has partnered with Palantir to permit its fashions for use for US protection and intelligence functions, and it additionally landed its own $200 million DoD contract. And Huge Tech gamers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, who’ve lengthy labored with the federal government, are actually additionally pushing AI merchandise for protection and intelligence, regardless of growing outcry from critics and employee activist groups.
So I wished to have Heidy on the present to stroll me by this main shift within the AI trade, what’s motivating it, and why she thinks a number of the main AI corporations are being far too cavalier about deploying generative AI in high-risk eventualities. I additionally wished to know what this push to deploy military-grade AI means for unhealthy actors who would possibly need to use AI methods to develop chemical, organic, radiological, and nuclear weapons — a danger the AI corporations themselves say they’re more and more apprehensive about.
Okay, right here’s Heidi Khlaaf on AI within the navy. Right here we go.
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