War Machine

Using the recent public dispute between the U.S. Department of Defense and Anthropic—and the subsequent user backlash against OpenAI—as a springboard, I trace the genealogy of frontier AI labs to foreground their shared lineages and militarized foundations. Read through necropolitics, the dispute reveals how AI ethics constructs a protected human subject while leaving others exposed to violence, clarifying whose lives its protections are designed to secure. For qualitative researchers, the question shifts from which model is most responsible to what forms of responsibility arise when inquiry depends on infrastructures shaped by war.