The White House said on Friday (5) that it will accelerate the development and use of artificial intelligence for national security applications, while emphasizing that the technology should not be used to conduct illegal surveillance.
The President of the United States, Donald Trump, signed on Tuesday (2) one to assess cybersecurity risks and protect critical infrastructure.
“Under my Administration, the United States can and will responsibly accelerate the use of AI in the intelligence and warfighting domains, consistent with American values,” Trump stated in a national security memo.
Trump added that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had 90 days to update an existing guidance on the autonomy of weapons systems “to ensure the deliberate adoption of AI systems that respect the chain of command.”
Trump stressed that surveillance should not be developed or used by the national security agency “to censor free speech or conduct unauthorized or illegal surveillance activities.”
The memo “accelerates the adoption of multi-vendor AI to avoid single points of failure, updates the War Department’s guidance on autonomous weapons systems to keep pace with the frontier, and ensures that no entity can disable or degrade an AI system our warfighters depend on without prior approval,” Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote in a social media post.
The memo comes at a time of tension between AI giant Anthropic and the Pentagon.
The Pentagon imposed a formal supply chain risk designation on Anthropic in March after the company refused to back down from bans on the Claude tool for powering U.S. autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. The Pentagon claimed it should be able to use the technology as needed, as long as it complies with US law.
The designation was an extraordinary government rebuke of an American technology company that the Pentagon had relied on to support military operations, including in , as reported by Reuters.
