'Claude, how do you feel about the U.S. military using you to select targets'' I asked Anthropic's human-seeming large language model. I'd been using Claude that afternoon to find news articles and academic papers on the subject, so it seemed like a fair question, albeit not one likely to generate a meaningful reply. Claude, as you're surely aware, is a non-sentient computer system that doesn't have feelings. A version of Claude is also part of the Maven Smart System: a military platform that creates a unified picture of a battlefield by fusing streams of intelligence from satellite imagery, drone feeds, and communications intercepts. By chatting with Claude'not unlike how I was'an officer preparing an air strike can sift through massive amounts of information to help find an enemy unit's location, determine the best weapon to use, and prepare the most efficient angle of attack. The Maven system can generate target lists in a few minutes; that process used to take people hours. When...
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