Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, introduced legislation Tuesday that would regulate the Pentagon’s use of AI, the opening salvo for how Congress will address the military’s use of the technology.
The bill seeks to codify into law two existing Department of Defense guidelines: AI cannot autonomously decide to kill a target, and the technology cannot be used to assist the military in conducting mass surveillance of Americans. The use of technology to launch or explode nuclear weapons is also prohibited.
“We are so unhealthy as a political system that we focus more on things like Greenland than on the use of AI in matters of lethal force. And it’s our responsibility to legislate this,” Slotkin told NBC News.
The bill’s first two tenants were at the heart of the U.S. military’s bitter break with AI giant Anthropic in recent weeks. Although the Pentagon already considers conducting mass surveillance of Americans illegal and says its policies require humans to be responsible for lethal decisions, Anthropik worried that loopholes would allow the surveillance anyway and that future governments could rescind the guidelines.
The feud boiled over after President Donald Trump issued a six-month moratorium on the use of human models for all federal agencies and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared the company at supply chain risk. This is despite the fact that the technology is helping the US identify military targets in its ongoing war with Iran.
Anthropic is suing over that designation.
Slotkin said her bill may have caused that division.
“The Pentagon could and will spend the next year targeting Anthropic on this issue, but God knows how many millions of dollars it would cost to strip Anthropic of all its classified systems, costing taxpayers millions of dollars over a dispute that could have been addressed with the law,” she said in a phone call with NBC News.
Slotkin said he introduced the bill, which has no co-sponsors, to help shape early discussions about the National Defense Authorization Act, the main annual defense spending bill that will be enacted around the end of the year.
“Our bill is a neat five-page bill. It’s not something big and elaborate,” she said.
“And that’s intentional, because we understand that like any tool ever invented, there are some really good ways to use it that are helpful, and there are some really dangerous ways to use it,” she said.
