When AI Decides You're a Threat — Brad Carson

When AI Decides You're a Threat — Brad Carson

From Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) by Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

May 31, 2026 · 1h 21m

About this episode

Brad Carson discusses the implications of AI in military contexts and the governance of AI technologies.

Brad Carson was the Army's General Counsel, served two terms in Congress and was Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. He now heads Americans for Responsible Innovation, the AI-policy advocacy group he co-founded. Keith Duggar spends roughly eighty minutes pushing back. SPONSOR: --- Cyber Fund built the Monastery to help founders ship products that were impossible a year ago. Applications for Batch 1 are now open. Apply now: https://cyber.fund --- Carson's whole case rests on one line: the genie is not out of the bottle. We have pulled dangerous tech back before. Asilomar halted recombinant DNA in 1975, and the West still controls the chips AI runs on. Calling it unstoppable, he says, is the most dangerous idea in the room. Then Keith drags him somewhere darker. A Palantir heat map scores you 0.73 on whether you are a combatant, and a strike follows. The model is wrong some accepted share of the time, and when it is, nobody answers for it. You cannot court-martial a model, and not even the interpretability researchers can say why it picked you. — Note: after recording, we learned that Americans for Responsible Innovation is backed by EA-aligned…

People in this episode

Host: Keith Duggar

Guest: Brad Carson

Topics covered

  • AI governance
  • military technology
  • regulatory capture
  • AI ethics
  • transparency in AI
  • tort liability
  • AI and combat

Keywords

  • AI policy
  • military ethics
  • regulatory issues
  • AI transparency
  • combatant identification
  • tort liability
  • recombinant DNA
  • Palantir technology

Sponsors

Cyber Fund

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Americans for Responsible Innovation, Palantir

Products: Claude

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