Is the Pentagon allowed to surveil Americans with AI?

March 13, 2026

(MIT Technology Review) – Artificial intelligence is supercharging surveillance, and the law has not caught up with it.

The ongoing public feud between the Department of Defense and the AI company Anthropic has raised a deep and still unanswered question: Does the law actually allow the US government to conduct mass surveillance on Americans?

Surprisingly, the answer is not straightforward. More than a decade after Edward Snowden exposed the NSA’s collection of bulk metadata from the phones of Americans, the US is still navigating a gap between what ordinary people think and what the law allows. (Read More)