Sen. Elissa Slotkin introduces bill to draw red lines for AI use by the military

Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, has introduced a bill to the Senate to regulate the Pentagon’s use of AI.

Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, introduced a bill Tuesday to regulate the Pentagon’s use of AI, an opening salvo in how Congress might address the military's use of the technology.

The bill seeks to codify two existing Defense Department guidelines into law: that AI cannot autonomously decide to kill a target and that the technology cannot be used to help the military conduct mass surveillance on Americans. It would also ban the use of the technology for launching or detonating a nuclear weapon.

“We’re unhealthy as a political system, and so we focus more on things like Greenland than we do on the use of AI in matters of lethal force. And it’s our responsibility to legislate this,” Slotkin told NBC News.

The first two tenants of the bill were at the center of the U.S. military’s acrimonious split with AI giant Anthropic in recent weeks. While the Pentagon has insisted that it regards conducting mass surveillance of Americans as illegal already and that its policy mandates that a human be responsible for lethal decisions, Anthropic worried that loopholes could allow for that surveillance anyway and that future administrations could revoke those guidelines.

The feud boiled over into President Donald Trump's decreeing that all federal agencies have six months to stop using Anthropic models and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's declaring the company a supply chain risk, despite the fact that the technology has still helped the U.S. identify military targets in its ongoing war with Iran.