Tell Congress: Ban AI in War and Surveillance
US Congress
The use of AI in warfare and surveillance is on par with the threat of biological weapons: the severity and scale of harm is so extreme that regulation won’t cut it—it requires a full-on ban.
In recent months, we’ve watched ICE agents weaponizing AI-powered surveillance tools to intimidate, threaten, and abduct people from communities across the country.
The same suppliers of these tools are also fueling the US’s attacks on Venezuela and Iran through programs like Palantir’s Project Maven and Anthropic’s Claude AI, which are spitting out coordinates and priority levels for missile strikes. Meanwhile the Israeli military continues to carry out the first AI-fueled genocide in the history of the world in Gaza. Russia and Ukraine have also been documented utilizing AI tools in deadly military operations.
This technology is extremely prone to bias and error, yet militaries are offloading the weight of literal life and death decisions to this tech, falsely lauding it for being ‘scientific’ and ‘mathematical.’ In the case of the Israeli military’s AI-powered system for tagging tens of thousands of people in Gaza as ‘kill targets,’ errors were known to be made ten percent of the time but military officials went ahead anyway, killing tens of thousands of women, elders, and children. The scale enabled by AI in warfare amplifies the impact of grave errors, not to mention the potential for immense abuse.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. Despite recent news of Anthropic rejecting a contract with the Department of Defense over concerns related to potential AI abuses and the lack of guardrails, we know that there will always be greed-driven tech companies willing to comply with outrageous government demands if it means big profits. That's why we need action and protection from lawmakers. Congress must act now to protect freedoms, security, and the future of humanity from the unchecked power of AI. Tell Congress: ban the use of AI in war and surveillance. AI in warfare poses an existential threat to our communities and the future of humanity – we need to put an end to its use immediately.
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To:
US Congress
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[Your Name]
The military assaults on Iran, Venezuela, and Palestine by the US and Israel are immoral, illegal, and reckless. The use of AI to supercharge and fuel these deadly wars poses enormous risks––not just to the communities getting attacked, but to humanity as a whole. Life and death decisions should not be left to machines, especially those prone to errors and hallucinations. These systems can malfunction, misidentify targets, or be manipulated. They undermine fundamental rights, amplify biases and discrimination, concentrate power in unaccountable systems and increase the risk of accidental or unjust violence. Most importantly, they expand the rate of targeting and killing at a previously unimaginable scale. We know that whatever tools the US uses in wars abroad ultimately end up in the hands of police and ICE back home. We cannot allow the continued use of this technology at the cost of human dignity, democratic freedoms, and global peace. Lawmakers must act now and ban the use of AI in war and surveillance.