Saturday, February 28, 2026

Why Tech is Pushing Back on AI for War

When Algorithms Meet the Battlefield: Why Tech Is Pushing Back on AI for War

For decades, technology companies proudly described themselves as neutral builders of tools, keyboards, search engines, cloud servers, code. But this week, that long-standing illusion finally cracked.

Across Silicon Valley and Washington, a public standoff has emerged over one of the most uncomfortable questions of our time:

Should artificial intelligence be used to fight wars and if so, who gets to decide how far it goes?

What makes this moment different is not just the technology involved, but the resistance coming from inside the tech industry itself.

A Line in the Sand

At the center of the controversy is Anthropic, an AI firm that has refused to allow its models to be used for unrestricted military purposes. The company argues that without firm safeguards, advanced AI could be used for autonomous weapons, mass surveillance, or battlefield decision-making without meaningful human oversight.

The response from the Pentagon has been swift and severe, with officials warning that limiting access to AI could weaken national security in an era increasingly described as an “AI arms race.”

This is no longer a quiet contract negotiation. It is a philosophical clash, ethics versus urgency, restraint versus power.

The Military’s Argument: Speed Is Survival

From the perspective of the U.S. Department of Defense, AI is not optional. It promises faster intelligence analysis, predictive logistics, and real-time decision support on increasingly complex battlefields.

Military leaders warn that adversaries are already racing ahead and that hesitation could come at a deadly cost.

But critics counter that speed without accountability has consequences, especially when decisions involve life and death.

Tech Workers Speak Out

What truly marks a turning point is the reaction from employees across the industry.

Engineers and researchers from companies like Google and OpenAI have signed open letters and petitions supporting stronger limits on military AI use. Many argue they did not enter the field to build systems that could one day decide who lives or dies.

This echoes earlier protests over surveillance technology and drone warfare, but with far higher stakes.

Not All Tech Companies Agree

While some firms are drawing ethical red lines, others are moving in the opposite direction.

OpenAI, for example, has recently entered agreements allowing its models to operate within classified government networks. Supporters say this proves ethical AI and national defense can coexist. Critics worry it normalizes military dependence on systems that were never meant to make lethal decisions.

The result? A fractured tech industry, no longer united by a single vision of progress.

Why This Moment Matters

This debate isn’t just about war. It’s about governance.

Who controls powerful AI systems?
Can private companies say “no” to governments?
Do engineers have moral agency over what they create?
And most importantly: can humanity slow down long enough to decide how far is too far?

History suggests that once a technology becomes possible, it eventually becomes used. But history also reminds us that choices made early shape decades to come.

A Personal Reflection

For years, we celebrated innovation as an unquestioned good. Faster. Smarter. More powerful. But AI forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth:

Progress without values is not progress at all.

The real battle unfolding right now isn’t between nations. It’s between competing visions of what technology is for and whether human judgment still has a place in the age of algorithms.

Closing Thought

This standoff may fade from headlines or it may define a generation of technology governance. Either way, the question will remain long after today’s news cycle ends:

When machines grow more powerful, will human restraint grow with them?

Finally,

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced late Friday that the company had signed a deal with the Pentagon for its AI tools to be used in the military's classified systems, hours after President Trump told federal agencies to stop using rival Anthropic's tech. https://cnn.it/3OBAKCl

My Photo of the Day:
Grand Six-Planet Alignment Begins February 28!

The sky will treat us to a rare planetary parade on the evening of February 28! Just after sunset, six planets will appear lined up across the western horizon, creating a spectacular cosmic display. Visible in the lineup will be Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and with binoculars Uranus.

Though the planets aren’t perfectly aligned in space, from Earth they’ll look like a beautifully choreographed celestial line. 

To catch the rare six-planet alignment on February 28, you want to head outside about 30-45 minutes after sunset. Since sunset is around 5:38 PM, you should look up between 6:08 PM and 6:23 PM.

The top Five News of the Day:

1. U.S. and Israel launch a major attack on Iran — The United States and Israel have begun significant military strikes inside Iran, with explosions reported near Tehran and other cities. President Trump stated “major combat operations” are underway and urged Iranians to rise against their government. The strikes have prompted immediate regional tensions.

2. Pakistan says it is in “open war” with Afghanistan — Pakistan’s defense minister publicly declared his country is engaged in an “open war” with Afghanistan, underscoring escalating military tensions in South Asia.

3. U.S. Senator criticizes strikes on Iran — Virginia Senator Tim Kaine called the military strikes on Iran “a colossal mistake,” highlighting rising political debate in the U.S. over the decision to use force.

4. Los Angeles schools superintendent placed on paid leave — Alberto Carvalho, head of the Los Angeles Unified School District, has been placed on paid leave amid a federal investigation, a significant development in U.S. education and governance.

5. Missing mother and 1-year-old son found safe — A missing Milwaukee mother and her young child, missing since early February, were located and reported safe by police in a positive resolution to a widely followed local missing persons case.

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Guest Article from Susan Creamer Joy

In The Silence, by Susan Creamer Joy.

Today's guest article is from Susan Creamer Joy. Susan is one of my favorite authors in the ViewsHound community. Susan writes, draws, paints and cobbles together art from found objects making a variety of creations from jewelry to religious shrines. She frequently sports burns on her fingers from her soldering iron, paint on her palms and ink under her fingernails, but her hair is usually combed. When she is not losing time in the creative vortex of her studio, she is likely to be putting her knowledge of metaphysics and esoteric principles including Tarot, numerology, astrology and graphology to good use in consultations. Her children are grown, her husband still works and her four dogs believe she needs serious help. The title of her article is "A Matter Of Love And Death". Thank you Susan.

By the time they reached my bedroom door, I was already sitting up – my stomach ratcheted in the tense grip of an unnamed anxiety; my pillow, unburdened of my drowsy head.

To this day I cannot explain how I heard them coming up those stairs in their bare feet or how I knew that my father struggled to hold his composure as my mother unnaturally clutched at the folds of her dressing gown and followed him through the dark just a little too closely.

As the wooden groan of those old stairs tore into my bones that morning like a hacksaw, all I could see between the predawn shadows was the letter I’d written just hours earlier to my boyfriend, Chris, propped against the lamp on my desk across the room awaiting an envelope.

I had not slept well. It was late November and there had been so many changes since the middle of August when he left for the Air Force in Texas to begin basic training and I began my third new school in as many years.

The conspiracy between fate and the last surge of the Vietnam draft had broken apart the every-waking-minutes of our two-year union with unceremonious indifference. All that night my sleep had been infested by difficult dreams and by the illogical fear that truth and reality were merging into a darkness only a martyr could grasp; and at sixteen, martyrdom seemed reasonable only for the nuns among the poor in Bangladesh

I tried to remind myself that he would be home on leave for Thanksgiving in another few days. It was the only tether to calm I could find, but reviewing the facts offered little relief from my baseless fears.

Chris had been girding his pacifist sensibilities preparing to fight in an unpopular war that had not yet slaughtered its last innocent. I was hovering just over the line of inclusion at an exclusive girl’s school – missing him – and finding myself at odds with these young women and their attachment to propriety and with the prep-school veneer that blinded them to the fact that they were no better than anyone else.

Neither one of us was coping well with the worlds into which we were respectively summoned, and although we both knew that the best hope for any future together depended upon our individual successes apart, it was far from comforting most days.

But in spite of our discomfort, we each did our best; and, of course, there were the letters: Thin, plain-paper sheets with row after row after row of inky blue words penned with the intensity and awkward locutions of a love learned too soon. It had come down to just that little, but without them, I would have had nothing.

Chris was learning to fly. I was learning to drive, and both of us were aching to transport our souls to an earlier time through the hallowed intercourse of memories and dreams. Of course, as with all progress, there was the positive element: We were both clean and drug-free for the first time in years.

Now, without pretense, both healthy cognition and sincere motivation surfaced regularly in my psychology and prompted me to care about myself and to arbitrate against all temptation for a better standing in the world, in school and in my own eyes. I even did my homework.

No longer was I escaping today but, instead, living for my day of escape. Lying still in the dark of my room, I listened to the slow, padded footfall of my parents approaching and looked to the floor and to my history book half hidden beneath the nightstand where I’d tossed it the night before. Even in this early morning dark I could make out the swirls and stars in colored marker and the bubble-formed letters that spelled C H R I S in soft, juvenile curves on the torn book cover I’d fashioned out of a brown paper grocery bag.

I vaguely remembered throwing it there somewhat hastily. I had been doing my homework when a sense of urgency struck and I realized I had not written him as I promised I would and glancing at the clock, I noted it was nine-twenty-three. Why that mattered I had no way of knowing in that strange moment, but within hours, it would be one I would never forget; and although I was becoming drowsy and still needed to finish my work, I felt beyond reason that my letter to him could not wait.

So, I wrote. I would always write. I would always be there. He would always be there.“Suzi."It was my name spoken in the smooth and familiar voice of my mother, although weighted and slow, her head bowed to her chest almost as though she were speaking only to herself.

"Suzi.” She said it again, this time with sharp gravity, like a chisel against stone.

As if on cue, I leaned forward, flanked now by my parents who were sitting on either side of my bed.

I had been waiting for them. I don’t know how. I didn’t know why. The lights in my room remained off, but it seemed that the darkness clung more to them than to me, as though they were holding it there – away from me to give me enough light to see through the next moment. They were crying. My father was crying. My father. “Suzi. We have something very, very bad to tell you." Chris has been in a car accident." And he was killed."

If the world moved forward from that moment, I could not know it. f there were air around me worth breathing, I could not take it in. And if there were another sound beyond the leaden bellow of my own raw grief, I could not hear it.

"Who am I going to talk to? Who am I going to love?” I wailed. Who will love me? In that sodden moment violated by the intrusion of a predawn light that had no business rising, everything I ever believed about happiness, hoped for in life, trusted in or held as my own was annihilated.

After that – there was no after that. After that came months of hollow redundancies that would inform my way of being in the world for years to come. A serial commitment to waking up each morning, remembering he was gone and dedicating the remaining hours to forgetting. To that end I would try anything, drink anything, ingest anything, inject anything. It was a slow and arbitrary suicide by indifference.

Many years later, at 25 years-old and in the midst of a pharmaceutical free-fall leaning dangerously close to terminal, I discovered that I was expecting a child, and after a decade of forgetting, I remembered. I named him Griffin after the legendary winged lion, a symbol of the divine because what he inspired and the miracle that he was, were nothing less. I remembered and I loved again, and I went on to marry and to the gift of two beautiful daughters.

Today my son is struggling not to drown in the same well of drug abuse and apathy that almost swallowed me – his great, divine wings clipped by his own hand; and while it is up to him to restore his place in the sky, I will do my best to help provide an open runway.

In the meantime, I will continue soaring for both of us; bequeathed as I have been, with a determination to fly from a boy whose ragged fate precluded that dream.

Death took one young man from me once upon a dark time. If it has any intention of coming for this one, it will have to go through me. And trust me, it will be in for one hell of a fight.

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