Maddow: AI weapons report should ‘cure’ any confusion that the technology could ‘kill us all’

MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow reacted to what she called “hair-raising” reporting from The Washington Post on how Donald Trump’s administration, in collaboration with Russia, weakened safeguards in a global effort to regulate weapons powered by artificial intelligence. As concerns about the technology continue to grow, Maddow said the report laid out “a pretty direct way to understand how AI could start killing humans in large numbers.”

In September hundreds of diplomats spent hours at a United Nations meeting working toward a first-of-its-kind agreement on lethal autonomous weapons, according to the Post. But on the final day of negotiations, U.S. and Russian diplomats “hammered away at the document, removing a range of provisions designed to safeguard the use of artificial intelligence in weapons, according to three people familiar with the negotiations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive closed-door proceedings, and documents reviewed by The Washington Post.”

The Post reported that U.S. and Russian teams removed a provision requiring humans to review AI-selected military targets before a strike.

Maddow questioned why the U.S. was “linking arms with Russia to ensure this is the new rules of the road.” She said Trump had “apparently just decided that this is how we should set things up with AI and military weapons” and appeared to believe “our best ally for achieving this vision will be his friend Vladimir Putin.”

The MS NOW host also pointed to Trump’s ties to the tech industry. Trump has repeatedly hosted high-ranking tech executives at the White House, including earlier this month when he awarded six prominent tech and AI leaders with the National Medal of Science. According to an analysis from The New Republic, the awardees collectively donated at least $6 billion to Trump’s campaign, his inauguration fund and his White House ballroom, as well as to pro-Trump super PACs and other initiatives aligned with the president’s agenda. Maddow said Trump “floats on a sea of cash and flattery from AI billionaires.”

The report comes amid what Maddow called “a bit of a national freak-out” over AI. Several of the industry’s top leaders have publicly called for an immediate slowdown in development, warning that the technology is advancing faster than humans can control it. Last month, Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at Anthropic, resigned from the company and warned that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

“Some people believe this threat is real; some people think this is not at all real, that this is not a real threat,” Maddow said.

She then described a third position that she thinks “a lot” of people are in — “that it’s just kind of hard to figure out what this is about.”

“It’s kind of hard to imagine how that would really work in practical terms,” she said. “How exactly would computer programs kill us physical beings?”

For that third group, Maddow said, the Post’s reporting should “cure” any confusion: “One scenario that takes really no imagination at all is a scenario in which we give AI models operational control over military weapons, and then we allow those same AI models to use military weapons to kill humans on their own say-so without any human having to OK it along the way. That doesn’t take any imagination at all to get from AI to AI killing us all.”