Entries Tagged "Department of Defense"

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Anthropic and the Pentagon

OpenAI is in and Anthropic is out as a supplier of AI technology for the US defense department. This news caps a week of bluster by the highest officials in the US government towards some of the wealthiest titans of the big tech industry, and the overhanging specter of the existential risks posed by a new technology powerful enough that the Pentagon claims it is essential to national security. At issue is Anthropic’s insistence that the US Department of Defense (DoD) could not use its models to facilitate “mass surveillance” or “fully autonomous weapons,” provisions the defense secretary Pete Hegseth derided as “woke.”

It all came to a head on Friday evening when Donald Trump issued an order for federal government agencies to discontinue use of Anthropic models. Within hours, OpenAI had swooped in, potentially seizing hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts by striking an agreement with the administration to provide classified government systems with AI.

Despite the histrionics, this is probably the best outcome for Anthropic—and for the Pentagon. In our free-market economy, both are, and should be, free to sell and buy what they want with whom they want, subject to longstanding federal rules on contracting, acquisitions, and blacklisting. The only factor out of place here are the Pentagon’s vindictive threats.

AI models are increasingly commodified. The top-tier offerings have about the same performance, and there is little to differentiate one from the other. The latest models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, in particular, tend to leapfrog each other with minor hops forward in quality every few months. The best models from one provider tend to be preferred by users to the second, or third, or 10th best models at a rate of only about six times out of 10, a virtual tie.

In this sort of market, branding matters a lot. Anthropic and its CEO, Dario Amodei, are positioning themselves as the moral and trustworthy AI provider. That has market value for both consumers and enterprise clients. In taking Anthropic’s place in government contracting, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, vowed to somehow uphold the same safety principles Anthropic had just been pilloried for. How that is possible given the rhetoric of Hegseth and Trump is entirely unclear, but seems certain to further politicize OpenAI and its products in the minds of consumers and corporate buyers.

Posturing publicly against the Pentagon and as a hero to civil libertarians is quite possibly worth the cost of the lost contracts to Anthropic, and associating themselves with the same contracts could be a trap for OpenAI. The Pentagon, meanwhile, has plenty of options. Even if no big tech company was willing to supply it with AI, the department has already deployed dozens of open weight models—whose parameters are public and are often licensed permissively for government use.

We can admire Amodei’s stance, but, to be sure, it is primarily posturing. Anthropic knew what they were getting into when they agreed to a defense department partnership for $200m last year. And when they signed a partnership with the surveillance company Palantir in 2024.

Read Amodei’s statement about the issue. Or his January essay on AIs and risk, where he repeatedly uses the words “democracy” and “autocracy” while evading precisely how collaboration with US federal agencies should be viewed in this moment. Amodei has bought into the idea of using “AI to achieve robust military superiority” on behalf of the democracies of the world in response to the threats from autocracies. It’s a heady vision. But it is a vision that likewise supposes that the world’s nominal democracies are committed to a common vision of public wellbeing, peace-seeking and democratic control.

Regardless, the defense department can also reasonably demand that the AI products it purchases meet its needs. The Pentagon is not a normal customer; it buys products that kill people all the time. Tanks, artillery pieces, and hand grenades are not products with ethical guard rails. The Pentagon’s needs reasonably involve weapons of lethal force, and those weapons are continuing on a steady, if potentially catastrophic, path of increasing automation.

So, at the surface, this dispute is a normal market give and take. The Pentagon has unique requirements for the products it uses. Companies can decide whether or not to meet them, and at what price. And then the Pentagon can decide from whom to acquire those products. Sounds like a normal day at the procurement office.

But, of course, this is the Trump administration, so it doesn’t stop there. Hegseth has threatened Anthropic not just with loss of government contracts. The administration has, at least until the inevitable lawsuits force the courts to sort things out, designated the company as “a supply-chain risk to national security,” a designation previously only ever applied to foreign companies. This prevents not only government agencies, but also their own contractors and suppliers, from contracting with Anthropic.

The government has incompatibly also threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act, which could force Anthropic to remove contractual provisions the department had previously agreed to, or perhaps to fundamentally modify its AI models to remove in-built safety guardrails. The government’s demands, Anthropic’s response, and the legal context in which they are acting will undoubtedly all change over the coming weeks.

But, alarmingly, autonomous weapons systems are here to stay. Primitive pit traps evolved to mechanical bear traps. The world is still debating the ethical use of, and dealing with the legacy of, land mines. The US Phalanx CIWS is a 1980s-era shipboard anti-missile system with a fully autonomous, radar-guided cannon. Today’s military drones can search, identify and engage targets without direct human intervention. AI will be used for military purposes, just as every other technology our species has invented has.

The lesson here should not be that one company in our rapacious capitalist system is more moral than another, or that one corporate hero can stand in the way of government’s adopting AI as technologies of war, or surveillance, or repression. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a world where such barriers are permanent or even particularly sturdy.

Instead, the lesson is about the importance of democratic structures and the urgent need for their renovation in the US. If the defense department is demanding the use of AI for mass surveillance or autonomous warfare that we, the public, find unacceptable, that should tell us we need to pass new legal restrictions on those military activities. If we are uncomfortable with the force of government being applied to dictate how and when companies yield to unsafe applications of their products, we should strengthen the legal protections around government procurement.

The Pentagon should maximize its warfighting capabilities, subject to the law. And private companies like Anthropic should posture to gain consumer and buyer confidence. But we should not rest on our laurels, thinking that either is doing so in the public’s interest.

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian.

Posted on March 6, 2026 at 12:07 PM • View Comments

The Signal Chat Leak and the NSA

US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who started the now-infamous group chat coordinating a US attack against the Yemen-based Houthis on March 15, is seemingly now suggesting that the secure messaging service Signal has security vulnerabilities.

"I didn’t see this loser in the group," Waltz told Fox News about Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, whom Waltz invited to the chat. "Whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical mean, is something we’re trying to figure out."

Waltz’s implication that Goldberg may have hacked his way in was followed by a report from CBS News that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had sent out a bulletin to its employees last month warning them about a security "vulnerability" identified in Signal.

The truth, however, is much more interesting. If Signal has vulnerabilities, then China, Russia, and other US adversaries suddenly have a new incentive to discover them. At the same time, the NSA urgently needs to find and fix any vulnerabilities quickly as it can—and similarly, ensure that commercial smartphones are free of backdoors—access points that allow people other than a smartphone’s user to bypass the usual security authentication methods to access the device’s contents.

That is essential for anyone who wants to keep their communications private, which should be all of us.

It’s common knowledge that the NSA’s mission is breaking into and eavesdropping on other countries’ networks. (During President George W. Bush’s administration, the NSA conducted warrantless taps into domestic communications as well—surveillance that several district courts ruled to be illegal before those decisions were later overturned by appeals courts. To this day, many legal experts maintain that the program violated federal privacy protections.) But the organization has a secondary, complementary responsibility: to protect US communications from others who want to spy on them. That is to say: While one part of the NSA is listening into foreign communications, another part is stopping foreigners from doing the same to Americans.

Those missions never contradicted during the Cold War, when allied and enemy communications were wholly separate. Today, though, everyone uses the same computers, the same software, and the same networks. That creates a tension.

When the NSA discovers a technological vulnerability in a service such as Signal (or buys one on the thriving clandestine vulnerability market), does it exploit it in secret, or reveal it so that it can be fixed? Since at least 2014, a US government interagency "equities" process has been used to decide whether it is in the national interest to take advantage of a particular security flaw, or to fix it. The trade-offs are often complicated and hard.

Waltz—along with Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and the other officials in the Signal group—have just made the trade-offs much tougher to resolve. Signal is both widely available and widely used. Smaller governments that can’t afford their own military-grade encryption use it. Journalists, human rights workers, persecuted minorities, dissidents, corporate executives, and criminals around the world use it. Many of these populations are of great interest to the NSA.

At the same time, as we have now discovered, the app is being used for operational US military traffic. So, what does the NSA do if it finds a security flaw in Signal?

Previously, it might have preferred to keep the flaw quiet and use it to listen to adversaries. Now, if the agency does that, it risks someone else finding the same vulnerability and using it against the US government. And if it was later disclosed that the NSA could have fixed the problem and didn’t, then the results might be catastrophic for the agency.

Smartphones present a similar trade-off. The biggest risk of eavesdropping on a Signal conversation comes from the individual phones that the app is running on. While it’s largely unclear whether the US officials involved had downloaded the app onto personal or government-issued phones—although Witkoff suggested on X that the program was on his "personal devices"—smartphones are consumer devices, not at all suitable for classified US government conversations. An entire industry of spyware companies sells capabilities to remotely hack smartphones for any country willing to pay. More capable countries have more sophisticated operations. Just last year, attacks that were later attributed to China attempted to access both President Donald Trump and Vance’s smartphones. Previously, the FBI—as well as law enforcement agencies in other countries—have pressured both Apple and Google to add "backdoors" in their phones to more easily facilitate court-authorized eavesdropping.

These backdoors would create, of course, another vulnerability to be exploited. A separate attack from China last year accessed a similar capability built into US telecommunications networks.

The vulnerabilities equities have swung against weakened smartphone security and toward protecting the devices that senior government officials now use to discuss military secrets. That also means that they have swung against the US government hoarding Signal vulnerabilities—and toward full disclosure.

This is plausibly good news for Americans who want to talk among themselves without having anyone, government or otherwise, listen in. We don’t know what pressure the Trump administration is using to make intelligence services fall into line, but it isn’t crazy to worry that the NSA might again start monitoring domestic communications.

Because of the Signal chat leak, it’s less likely that they’ll use vulnerabilities in Signal to do that. Equally, bad actors such as drug cartels may also feel safer using Signal. Their security against the US government lies in the fact that the US government shares their vulnerabilities. No one wants their secrets exposed.

I have long advocated for a "defense dominant" cybersecurity strategy. As long as smartphones are in the pocket of every government official, police officer, judge, CEO, and nuclear power plant operator—and now that they are being used for what the White House now calls calls  "sensitive," if not outright classified conversations among cabinet members—we need them to be as secure as possible. And that means no government-mandated backdoors.

We may find out more about how officials—including the vice president of the United States—came to be using Signal on what seem to be consumer-grade smartphones, in a apparent breach of the laws on government records. It’s unlikely that they really thought through the consequences of their actions.

Nonetheless, those consequences are real. Other governments, possibly including US allies, will now have much more incentive to break Signal’s security than they did in the past, and more incentive to hack US government smartphones than they did before March 24.

For just the same reason, the US government has urgent incentives to protect them.

This essay was originally published in Foreign Policy.

Posted on March 31, 2025 at 7:04 AM • View Comments

Drones and the US Air Force

Fascinating analysis of the use of drones on a modern battlefield—that is, Ukraine—and the inability of the US Air Force to react to this change.

The F-35A certainly remains an important platform for high-intensity conventional warfare. But the Air Force is planning to buy 1,763 of the aircraft, which will remain in service through the year 2070. These jets, which are wholly unsuited for countering proliferated low-cost enemy drones in the air littoral, present enormous opportunity costs for the service as a whole. In a set of comments posted on LinkedIn last month, defense analyst T.X. Hammes estimated the following. The delivered cost of a single F-35A is around $130 million, but buying and operating that plane throughout its lifecycle will cost at least $460 million. He estimated that a single Chinese Sunflower suicide drone costs about $30,000—so you could purchase 16,000 Sunflowers for the cost of one F-35A. And since the full mission capable rate of the F-35A has hovered around 50 percent in recent years, you need two to ensure that all missions can be completed—for an opportunity cost of 32,000 Sunflowers. As Hammes concluded, “Which do you think creates more problems for air defense?”

Ironically, the first service to respond decisively to the new contestation of the air littoral has been the U.S. Army. Its soldiers are directly threatened by lethal drones, as the Tower 22 attack demonstrated all too clearly. Quite unexpectedly, last month the Army cancelled its future reconnaissance helicopter ­ which has already cost the service $2 billion—because fielding a costly manned reconnaissance aircraft no longer makes sense. Today, the same mission can be performed by far less expensive drones—without putting any pilots at risk. The Army also decided to retire its aging Shadow and Raven legacy drones, whose declining survivability and capabilities have rendered them obsolete, and announced a new rapid buy of 600 Coyote counter-drone drones in order to help protect its troops.

Posted on March 18, 2024 at 7:03 AM • View Comments

Levels of Assurance for DoD Microelectronics

The NSA has has published criteria for evaluating levels of assurance required for DoD microelectronics.

The introductory report in a DoD microelectronics series outlines the process for determining levels of hardware assurance for systems and custom microelectronic components, which include application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and other devices containing reprogrammable digital logic.

The levels of hardware assurance are determined by the national impact caused by failure or subversion of the top-level system and the criticality of the component to that top-level system. The guidance helps programs acquire a better understanding of their system and components so that they can effectively mitigate against threats.

The report was published last month, but I only just noticed it.

Posted on August 29, 2022 at 9:30 AM • View Comments

The DoD Isn't Fixing Its Security Problems

It has produced several reports outlining what’s wrong and what needs to be fixed. It’s not fixing them:

GAO looked at three DoD-designed initiatives to see whether the Pentagon is following through on its own goals. In a majority of cases, DoD has not completed the cybersecurity training and awareness tasks it set out to. The status of various efforts is simply unknown because no one has tracked their progress. While an assessment of “cybersecurity hygiene” like this doesn’t directly analyze a network’s hardware and software vulnerabilities, it does underscore the need for people who use digital systems to interact with them in secure ways. Especially when those people work on national defense.

[…]

The report focuses on three ongoing DoD cybersecurity hygiene initiatives. The 2015 Cybersecurity Culture and Compliance Initiative outlined 11 education-related goals for 2016; the GAO found that the Pentagon completed only four of them. Similarly, the 2015 Cyber Discipline plan outlined 17 goals related to detecting and eliminating preventable vulnerabilities from DoD’s networks by the end of 2018. GAO found that DoD has met only six of those. Four are still pending, and the status of the seven others is unknown, because no one at DoD has kept track of the progress.

GAO repeatedly identified lack of status updates and accountability as core issues within DoD’s cybersecurity awareness and education efforts. It was unclear in many cases who had completed which training modules. There were even DoD departments lacking information on which users should have their network access revoked for failure to complete trainings.

The report.

Posted on April 17, 2020 at 10:35 AM • View Comments

Security Vulnerabilities in US Weapons Systems

The US Government Accounting Office just published a new report: “Weapons Systems Cyber Security: DOD Just Beginning to Grapple with Scale of Vulnerabilities” (summary here). The upshot won’t be a surprise to any of my regular readers: they’re vulnerable.

From the summary:

Automation and connectivity are fundamental enablers of DOD’s modern military capabilities. However, they make weapon systems more vulnerable to cyber attacks. Although GAO and others have warned of cyber risks for decades, until recently, DOD did not prioritize weapon systems cybersecurity. Finally, DOD is still determining how best to address weapon systems cybersecurity.

In operational testing, DOD routinely found mission-critical cyber vulnerabilities in systems that were under development, yet program officials GAO met with believed their systems were secure and discounted some test results as unrealistic. Using relatively simple tools and techniques, testers were able to take control of systems and largely operate undetected, due in part to basic issues such as poor password management and unencrypted communications. In addition, vulnerabilities that DOD is aware of likely represent a fraction of total vulnerabilities due to testing limitations. For example, not all programs have been tested and tests do not reflect the full range of threats.

It is definitely easier, and cheaper, to ignore the problem or pretend it isn’t a big deal. But that’s probably a mistake in the long run.

Posted on October 10, 2018 at 6:21 AM • View Comments

What is the DoD's Position on Backdoors in Security Systems?

In May, Admiral James A. Winnefeld, Jr., vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave an address at the Joint Service Academies Cyber Security Summit at West Point. After he spoke for twenty minutes on the importance of Internet security and a good national defense, I was able to ask him a question (32:42 mark) about security versus surveillance:

Bruce Schneier: I’d like to hear you talk about this need to get beyond signatures and the more robust cyber defense and ask the industry to provide these technologies to make the infrastructure more secure. My question is, the only definition of “us” that makes sense is the world, is everybody. Any technologies that we’ve developed and built will be used by everyone—nation-state and non-nation-state. So anything we do to increase our resilience, infrastructure, and security will naturally make Admiral Rogers’s both intelligence and attack jobs much harder. Are you okay with that?

Admiral James A. Winnefeld: Yes. I think Mike’s okay with that, also. That’s a really, really good question. We call that IGL. Anyone know what IGL stands for? Intel gain-loss. And there’s this constant tension between the operational community and the intelligence community when a military action could cause the loss of a critical intelligence node. We live this every day. In fact, in ancient times, when we were collecting actual signals in the air, we would be on the operational side, “I want to take down that emitter so it’ll make it safer for my airplanes to penetrate the airspace,” and they’re saying, “No, you’ve got to keep that emitter up, because I’m getting all kinds of intelligence from it.” So this is a familiar problem. But I think we all win if our networks are more secure. And I think I would rather live on the side of secure networks and a harder problem for Mike on the intelligence side than very vulnerable networks and an easy problem for Mike. And part of that—it’s not only the right thing do, but part of that goes to the fact that we are more vulnerable than any other country in the world, on our dependence on cyber. I’m also very confident that Mike has some very clever people working for him. He might actually still be able to get some work done. But it’s an excellent question. It really is.

It’s a good answer, and one firmly on the side of not introducing security vulnerabilities, backdoors, key-escrow systems, or anything that weakens Internet systems. It speaks to what I have seen as a split in the Second Crypto War, between the NSA and the FBI on building secure systems versus building systems with surveillance capabilities.

I have written about this before:

But here’s the problem: technological capabilities cannot distinguish based on morality, nationality, or legality; if the US government is able to use a backdoor in a communications system to spy on its enemies, the Chinese government can use the same backdoor to spy on its dissidents.

Even worse, modern computer technology is inherently democratizing. Today’s NSA secrets become tomorrow’s PhD theses and the next day’s hacker tools. As long as we’re all using the same computers, phones, social networking platforms, and computer networks, a vulnerability that allows us to spy also allows us to be spied upon.

We can’t choose a world where the US gets to spy but China doesn’t, or even a world where governments get to spy and criminals don’t. We need to choose, as a matter of policy, communications systems that are secure for all users, or ones that are vulnerable to all attackers. It’s security or surveillance.

NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers was in the audience (he spoke earlier), and I saw him nodding at Winnefeld’s answer. Two weeks later, at CyCon in Tallinn, Rogers gave the opening keynote, and he seemed to be saying the opposite.

“Can we create some mechanism where within this legal framework there’s a means to access information that directly relates to the security of our respective nations, even as at the same time we are mindful we have got to protect the rights of our individual citizens?”

[…]

Rogers said a framework to allow law enforcement agencies to gain access to communications is in place within the phone system in the United States and other areas, so “why can’t we create a similar kind of framework within the internet and the digital age?”

He added: “I certainly have great respect for those that would argue that they most important thing is to ensure the privacy of our citizens and we shouldn’t allow any means for the government to access information. I would argue that’s not in the nation’s best long term interest, that we’ve got to create some structure that should enable us to do that mindful that it has to be done in a legal way and mindful that it shouldn’t be something arbitrary.”

Does Winnefeld know that Rogers is contradicting him? Can someone ask JCS about this?

Posted on June 24, 2015 at 7:42 AM • View Comments

DARPA Contest for Fully Automated Network Defense

DARPA is looking for a fully automated network defense system:

What if computers had a “check engine” light that could indicate new, novel security problems? What if computers could go one step further and heal security problems before they happen?

To find out, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) intends to hold the Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC)—the first-ever tournament for fully automatic network defense systems. DARPA envisions teams creating automated systems that would compete against each other to evaluate software, test for vulnerabilities, generate security patches and apply them to protected computers on a network. To succeed, competitors must bridge the expert gap between security software and cutting-edge program analysis research. The winning team would receive a cash prize of $2 million.

Some news articles. Slashdot thread. Reddit thread.

Posted on October 24, 2013 at 8:45 AM • View Comments

NSA Job Opening

The NSA is looking for a Civil Liberties & Privacy Officer. It appears to be an internal posting.

The NSA Civil Liberties & Privacy Officer (CLPO) is conceived as a completely new role, combining the separate responsibilities of NSA’s existing Civil Liberties and Privacy (CL/P) protection programs under a single official. The CLPO will serve as the primary advisor to the Director of NSA for ensuring that privacy is protected and civil liberties are maintained by all of NSA’s missions, programs, policies and technologies. This new position is focused on the future, designed to directly enhance decision making and to ensure that CL/P protections continue to be baked into NSA’s future operations, technologies, tradecraft, and policies. The NSA CLPO will consult regularly with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence CLPO, privacy and civil liberties officials from the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice, as well as other U.S. government, private sector, public advocacy groups and foreign partners.

EDITED TO ADD (9/23): Better link here that allows new registration for prospective applicants—it’s Job ID 1039797.

Posted on September 23, 2013 at 1:14 PM • View Comments

US Department of Defense Censors Snowden Story

The US Department of Defense is blocking sites that are reporting about the Snowden documents. I presume they’re not censoring sites that are smearing him personally. Note that the DoD is only blocking those sites on its own network, not on the Internet at large. The blocking is being done by automatic filters, presumably the same ones used to block porn or other sites it deems inappropriate.

Anyone know if my blog is being censored? I’m kinda curious.

Posted on July 3, 2013 at 6:02 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.