We Need To Talk About Pete Hegseth’s Pervert Boner AI Mass Surveillance Killer Robot Fantasies
Welcome to dystopia.
“Claude is not immune from hallucinations and not reliable enough to avoid potentially lethal mistakes, like unintended escalation or mission failure without human judgment, the person said.”
That’s a quote from the latest CBS News article about the negotiations between Anthropic, the company that makes AI LLM chat robot Claude, and the Pentagon, whose leader Secretary Pete “Shitfaced” Hegseth is demanding carte blanche to be able to use Claude for whatever perverted purposes he can come up with.
“Negotiations” may not be the correct word here. We're after all talking about a Defense secretary with pathetic masculinity issues who demands to be addressed as the secretary of WAR, who somehow failed upward from being a not-very-accomplished guardsman all the way through a Fox News makeup chair (covers up those unsightly bumps on his face) to now running the most powerful military in the history of humanity. A man who’s been credibly accused of rape one time that we know of, and has the receipt for the hush money settlement he paid out to show for it. Who summons all the nation’s top generals from all corners of the globe to force them to watch him prance around a stage giving them hairstyle tips, just because he can, because he’s (allegedly) replaced being drunk on booze with being drunk on power.
Who’s currently getting his giggleboners playing Army Guy while giving (illegal) orders to bomb (probably totally innocent) men to death in little boats in the middle of the ocean. Just like a video game!
It’s probably more accurate to say Hegseth is bullying Anthropic into letting him have his way with Claude. (No word on whether there’s a bonus if they program Claude to tell him he’s the biggest one Claude’s ever seen.)
![A Sober [Hic!] Assessment Of Pete Hegseth’s First (Last?) Year As Defense Secretary](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hnxI!,w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffd18c303-2f49-4bb9-9559-7138b54e8c37_1456x811.webp)
All those headlines right there? That is the man demanding unfettered use of some of the most powerful AI technology in the world right now.
If you haven’t followed this story closely, the general parameters are that the Pentagon has given Anthropic a deadline of 5:01 p.m. tomorrow (Friday) to drop all safeguards on Claude, or risk losing the $200 million contract they already have. The company has so far said fuck off.
Anthropic has two sticking points: 1) they don’t want Claude used for mass surveillance of Americans, and 2) they don’t want Claude to be able to make final targeting decisions on what to bomb the shit out of without human involvement. In other words, killer drones that can make their own drone killing decisions.
That’s what Secretary Shitfaced The White Fratboy DEI Hire is pissed Anthropic won’t let him have.
How very dare they!
Not only is the Pentagon saying Anthropic could lose its contract, they’re also threatening to label Anthropic as a supply chain risk, and to invoke the Defense Production Act to force them to hand over the technology if they don’t comply by 5:01 tomorrow. For context, the Defense Production Act is the Cold War law that, among other things, was used during COVID by both Donald Trump and Joe Biden to coopt American industry to speed up the production of vaccines and other crucially needed medical supplies.
It’s meant to be used in actual emergencies. But as we’ve seen with the regime of Stupid Hitler, they’ll invoke an imaginary “emergency” to do anything they want. Emergency brown people invasion! Emergency Trump is having hallucinations inside his butthole that say China stole the 2020 election!
Time to do the fascism!
The Trump Pentagon, run by inveterate liars, says no, no, we have it all wrong. They only want to use Claude for lawful purposes. Christ only fucking knows what kind of legal justifications they’ve got worked up for why Americans should be subject to mass surveillance at all times, or maybe some “antifa domestic terror threats” — likely by Pam Bondi’s insane Christian nationalist definition that includes grandmas who hold signs protesting ICE — need to be droned to death in their beds.
Oh well, it’s not like a Republican American government has ever done extremely creepy things on the mass surveillance front before, nope.
Of course, periodic reminder that our fascists are extremely stupid fascists, as Politico explained this week:
It was not immediately clear how the Pentagon intends to label Anthropic a supply chain risk — which typically requires the government and its contractors to cut ties with that company — while simultaneously invoking the Defense Production Act to compel the company to cooperate with the Pentagon.
Like we said, this is just bullying. There is no emergency, Anthropic is not a supply chain risk, it’s all bullshit. Secretary Shitfaced is mad some bitch named Claude in a short skirt is telling him no.
But again, that quote we started with: “Claude is not immune from hallucinations and not reliable enough to avoid potentially lethal mistakes, like unintended escalation or mission failure without human judgment, the person said.”
To be clear, Claude is already used in the Pentagon. It’s considered the best when it comes to defense and intel purposes, and as Andrew Egger notes at the Bulwark, it’s the only one they have a contract to use in classified situations. It’s not like Anthropic is some angel over here saying, “No! You may not use our Jane Fonda Code Pink hippie free love AI boner robot for war!” This standoff is happening because it’s over Claude.
They used Claude in the Maduro kidnapping/raid. “The deployment of Claude occurred through Anthropic’s partnership with data company Palantir Technologies, whose tools are commonly used by the Defense Department and federal law enforcement,” reported the Wall Street Journal. (Evil evil evil.)
But Anthropic was concerned about that, which is where this standoff seems to have begun. Sean Parnell, Hegseth’s number one asslicker spox at the Pentagon, said at the time, “Our nation requires that our partners be willing to help our warfighters win in any fight.” (If official statements from the Pentagon do not include the word WARFIGHTER, Hegseth might lose his ability to wake up with morning wood, it’s not worth the risk. At least we are guessing that’s the rule.)
This is so fucked up.
Did we mention that a new study from King’s College, reported yesterday in New Scientist, found that “Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases”? They appear to have approximately the self-control and good judgment of, well, Pete Hegseth.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei reportedly made clear to Shitfaced on Tuesday that those two red lines — no mass surveillance, no murder droning without human input — were still their red lines. They have standards. They may be incredibly low standards, mind you: This very week, the company dropped its “core safety promise,” which as CNN puts it “stipulated that it should pause training more powerful models if their capabilities outstripped the company’s ability to control them and ensure their safety.”
But hey! This far and no further, OK?
And yeah yeah yeah, we know, all of these AI companies are pretty evil. Which makes this a pretty powerful demonstration of just how far we’ve fallen in such a short amount of time that we’re even having this conversation. Egger quotes Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren in the Bulwark, and writes:
“Anthropic is trying to do the right thing and put their own guardrails in place in the absence of legislation,” [Lofgren said]. “It should go without saying that AI technology should not be making potentially lethal decisions without human involvement. I fear what America will become if the DoD is given this unrestricted power.”
Maybe that’s the biggest takeaway from this whole crazy story: While it’s nice that Anthropic is digging in their heels here, it’s insane that such questions as “how much killing will we let the killer robots do on their own” are being hashed out as back-room handshakes between the military and its AI contractors in the first place. This seems like a matter of public policy if ever there was one.
Little bit.
It’s not hard to see why Pete Hegseth would love the idea of mass surveillance of all the Americans who make him feel insecure, though.
And how exciting would it be for the robots to be able to make the final decisions on who to murder? Decisions is hard for not-very-smart guys like him who don’t really know much about modern warfare and stuff!
Plus if he doesn’t have to make the final call, it’ll really free up both of his hands while he’s watching the live feed of whoever his WARFIGHTERS are murdering that day. (Whack whack whack.)
Welcome to dystopia.
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At the end of January we did the movie WarGames, I was a little early.
But we watched Dave last week so you never know what could happen in a month.
Anyways here's the Movie Night schedule for March and there's a little MST3K thrown in there!
https://ziggywiggy.substack.com/p/wonkette-movie-night-march-2026?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
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