Warren presses DOD, AI firms for military contract disclosures

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) this week urged Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and several artificial intelligence companies to provide Congress with details about safeguards governing the military use of commercial AI technology deployed under agreements the Pentagon announced May 1 . Warren sent letters to Hegseth and executives at Google, SpaceX, NVIDIA, Reflection AI, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Oracle requesting the full text of the agreements, which allow the companies to deploy their AI technology on U.S. military classified networks. “The speed with which the Department is integrating AI into both day-to-day work and national security operations is alarming given the Department has yet to provide Congress or the public with any meaningful details on how it plans to use these tools and what testing and safeguards have been put in place to prevent mistakes or misuse,” Warren said in the letter addressed to Hegseth . In letters to the AI companies , Warren said she is concerned the agreements announced in May could allow the Pentagon to use their technology "to impinge on Americans' rights or engage in unlawful warfare." “Even contractual terms which ostensibly include prohibitions on domestic surveillance along with other guardrails can in fact give DOD significant leeway to conduct mass surveillance and operate lethal autonomous weapons with minimal human oversight,” Warren wrote. Without seeing the full text of these contracts -- which Warren pointed out neither the Pentagon nor any of the companies have made available -- the senator said it would be impossible for lawmakers or experts to assess any safeguards on the use of the AI firms’ technology in military operations. Warren’s letters and concerns arise as lawmakers have yet to pass the defense policy bill for fiscal year 2027 -- which, in the Senate’s version, includes a provision seeking to maintain human control in autonomous and semi-autonomous military technologies. Separate from the proposed FY-27 defense policy bill, Sens. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ) introduced their own legislative proposals earlier this month aimed at codifying guardrails over the military’s use of autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems. Warren, who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, raised concerns about the Pentagon’s use of AI earlier this year, when she released a joint statement with fellow Democratic Sen. Andy Kim (NJ) slamming Hegseth’s decision to “blacklist” AI firm Anthropic and divest its technology from all military systems following a dispute over how the U.S. military would use it.