By Katharine Jackson and Karen Freifeld
WASHINGTON, June 5 (Reuters) – The White House said on Friday it would accelerate the development and use of AI for national security applications, while stressing that the technology should not be used to carry out unlawful surveillance.
The Trump administration said earlier this week that it would ask leading AI developers to voluntarily submit their most capable models for government cybersecurity tests before releasing them to the public, as security fears mount in Washington over powerful new AI systems.
“Under my Administration, the United States can and will responsibly accelerate the use of AI across intelligence and warfighting domains in line with American values,” President Donald Trump said in a national security memorandum.
Trump said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had 90 days to update an existing directive on the autonomy of weapons systems “to ensure the deliberate adoption of AI systems that respect the chain of command.”
Trump added that AI technologies should not be developed or used by the national security enterprise “to censor free speech … or conduct unauthorized or unlawful surveillance activities.”
The memorandum “accelerates AI adoption from multiple vendors to prevent single points of failure, updates @DeptofWar’s guidance on autonomous weapons systems to keep pace with the frontier, and ensures no entity can disable or degrade an AI system our warfighters depend on without prior approval,” Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote in a social media posting.
The memorandum comes in the wake of a clash between AI lab Anthropic and the Pentagon.
The Pentagon slapped a formal supply-chain risk designation on Anthropic in March after it refused to back down on bans for its Claude AI to power autonomous weapons and mass U.S. surveillance. The Pentagon said it should be able to use the technology as needed, as long as it complied with U.S. law.
The designation was an extraordinary rebuke by the administration of an American tech company that the Pentagon has relied on to support military operations, including in Iran, as Reuters has reported.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the memorandum or on a meeting with AI executives that Trump said on Friday he planned to host as soon as next week.
(Reporting by Katharine Jackson and Karen Freifeld; Writing by David Ljunggren and Karen Freifeld; Editing by Caitlin Webber, Rosalba O’Brien and Nia Williams)
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