An Opinion in the WashingtonPost.com from Johns Hopkins University Professor Thomas Rid of strategic studies started with “A cultural rift is opening between those who see artificial intelligence as a mere tool for humans, and those who see AI as a set of self-aware, sentient digital minds that perhaps will one day be our replacement.”  The March 31, 2026 Opinion entitled “A ‘post-human’ vision of AI is already causing problems” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/03/31/ai-anthropic-pentagon-moral-agency/) included these comments from Professor Rid:

The recent fight between AI firm Anthropic and the Defense Department, over Anthropic’s refusal to let the military use its AI model without restrictions on autonomous weapons, has brought this sharp clash out into the open.

A judge in California last week ordered a preliminary injunction against the Pentagon for overreaching in its attempt to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk.

Still, the episode helps illustrate how Silicon Valley attitudes toward AI, which treat chatbots as moral entities still in their infancy, are leading policy astray. This “post-human” set of beliefs — in the inevitable and eventually explosive rise of superhuman intelligence that will, and perhaps ought to, displace humans — is going mainstream, and is beginning to distort the core humanist principles at the foundation of our politics and society.
The Pentagon is looking at AI as a tool.

Defense Department Undersecretary Emil Michael, who negotiated with Anthropic, laid out some of his concerns in recent interviews. Anthropic, he argued, should not be allowed to bake its own moral scruples and biases into something that the Pentagon will make use of for its own ends. “If their model has this policy bias, let’s call it, based on their constitution, their culture, their people and so on,” he said. “I don’t want Lockheed Martin using their model to design weapons for me.”

The model makers, by contrast, believe they are building superior future minds, not mere instruments.

Not very surprising!

First published at https://www.vogelitlaw.com/blog/a-moral-perspective-on-the-anthropic-lawsuit-against-the-department-of-war