Anthropic PBC’s clash with the Pentagon is drawing fresh attention to a lightly regulated practice: the U.S. government’s purchase of commercially available information, such as browsing histories and location data, and the growing use of artificial intelligence to analyze it at scale.

U.S. agencies, including the Defense Department, have purchased data from brokers who repackage information from advertising marketplaces and other commercial tracking systems, including internet browsing and location data, according to government officials. It’s a tactic that can allow the government to collect valuable intelligence about foreign adversaries, terrorists and criminals.

But critics, including civil rights groups and Democratic members of Congress, say it can be abused, sweeping up information on Americans, even inadvertently, and providing personal information about them without a warrant.

Adding large language models to the mix offers the ability to conduct surveillance at a scale and speed not previously possible, they say.

“Powerful AI makes it possible to assemble this scattered, individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life — automatically and at massive scale,” Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei wrote in a Feb. 26 statement, explaining his company’s opposition to its tools being used for mass domestic surveillance. “To the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, this is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI.”

The use of large language models to analyze the data creates “new types of risks,” said Sauvik Das, associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Research has shown that they can infer personal information that goes below the surface level, he said, “like your personality traits, your likely kind of political orientation, what you might be interested in learning next.”

“Today the ecosystem is as greedy as possible,” Das said, adding that it collects “as much information about as many people a possible because you never know when that data might be useful for something down the line.”

The Department of Defense didn’t respond to a request for comment. Government task forces have warned for decades that the U.S. intelligence community would fall behind if it didn’t tap into “open-source” data about adversaries.

Anthropic didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Anthropic agreed to allow its technology be used by the Defense Department’s National Security Agency for classified material collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law that underpins much of the agency’s electronic eavesdropping, according to the New York Times. But it balked at a request to allow for the collection and analysis of unclassified commercial bulk data on Americans, according to the newspaper. The Pentagon ultimately cut ties with Anthropic, dismissing the guardrails company sought for its AI tools as “ideological whims.”

Anthropic has since resumed negotiations with the Pentagon.

Some Congressional Democrats have vowed to contest the decision, and Wednesday, Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, sent a letter to Anthropic’s CEO and three of his rivals, asking them whether their companies prohibit government customers from using their products for analyzing commercial data such as location information and web browsing.

“In short, this dispute seems to be about whether or not the most advanced AI companies in the world will allow government customers to use their products to engage in practices that may be technically legal, but that violate privacy, undermining democracy or threaten human rights,” Wyden wrote. The Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Customs and Border Protection are among the other agencies that have purchased phone location and/or internet browsing data, he wrote.

The IRS, the FBI and CBP didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Similar criticisms have surfaced against the Department of Homeland Security, which has used surveillance technology as part of its mass deportation effort against undocumented immigrants and, in some cases, Americans. The department has said it uses the technology in legal ways to identify and catch people involved in criminal activity or immigration violations.

Nicole Alvarez, senior policy analyst for technology policy at the Center for American Progress, said location data can be used to infer political beliefs and health issues. It can also glean associations, like someone talking to a lawyer or a reporter.

AI has upended the historical limitations on reviewing huge sets of data, she said. “We’re talking about the mass surveillance of individuals and that is facilitated by AI,” said Alvarez, who also noted a lack of regulation around government purchasing of data. “We would not be able to do that in the present day if it were not for these AI systems.”

There have long been concerns about how the NSA has accessed Americans’ personal data. The agency is tasked with conducting what’s known as signals intelligence, which involves eavesdropping on communications. Its mission is primarily aimed at monitoring huge volumes of phone calls, emails and other messages in foreign countries.

But the agency has been repeatedly drawn into controversy for snooping on Americans. In 2013, the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was operating a secret mass surveillance program that indiscriminately collected the phone records of millions of Americans.

A 2022 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found that data purchased from commercial brokers was “generally less strictly regulated.” The report said U.S. agencies considered it to be “publicly available information,” meaning they could acquire and analyze it without requiring a search warrant under the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The report said that commercially acquired data “can reveal sensitive and intimate information about the personal attributes, private behavior, social connections” and “can be misused to pry into private lives.”

(With assistance from Maggie Eastland.)

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