Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, introduced a bill Tuesday to regulate the Pentagon’s use of AI, an opening salvo in how Congress might address the military's use of the technology.
The bill seeks to codify two existing Defense Department guidelines into law: that AI cannot autonomously decide to kill a target and that the technology cannot be used to help the military conduct mass surveillance on Americans. It would also ban the use of the technology for launching or detonating a nuclear weapon.
“We’re unhealthy as a political system, and so we focus more on things like Greenland than we do on the use of AI in matters of lethal force. And it’s our responsibility to legislate this,” Slotkin told NBC News.
The first two tenants of the bill were at the center of the U.S. military’s acrimonious split with AI giant Anthropic in recent weeks. While the Pentagon has insisted that it regards conducting mass surveillance of Americans as illegal already and that its policy mandates that a human be responsible for lethal decisions, Anthropic worried that loopholes could allow for that surveillance anyway and that future administrations could revoke those guidelines.
The feud boiled over into President Donald Trump's decreeing that all federal agencies have six months to stop using Anthropic models and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's declaring the company a supply chain risk, despite the fact that the technology has still helped the U.S. identify military targets in its ongoing war with Iran.
Anthropic is suing over that designation.
Slotkin said her legislation could have headed off that split.
“The Pentagon was able to target Anthropic in this case and is going to spend the next year and God knows how many millions of dollars ripping out Anthropic from all the classified systems, something that’s going to cost the taxpayer an enormous amount of money over a dispute that could have been handled if we just had law,” she said in a phone call with NBC News.
Slotkin said she introduced the bill, which has no cosponsors, with the aim of helping to shape early conversations of the major annual defense spending bill, the National Defense Authorization Act, which is legislated around the end of the year.
“Our bill is a neat five pages. This is not an extensive, elaborate thing,” she said.
“And that is on purpose, because we understand that, like with every tool ever invented, there are some really good uses that help and there are some really dangerous uses,” she said.
