The U.S. government isn’t just buying AI tools. It’s building the infrastructure for a surveillance apparatus that would make the authors of the Fourth Amendment reach for their muskets.
OpenAI’s accelerating partnership with the Department of Defense has moved from theoretical debate to operational reality. According to The New Stack, the company that once pledged never to develop military applications has reversed course, working directly with defense agencies on applications that include cybersecurity operations and processing of sensitive government data. The pivot wasn’t subtle. OpenAI quietly updated its usage policies to remove prohibitions on military use, then began courting Pentagon contracts with the enthusiasm of a Beltway defense contractor.
This isn’t about national security in the abstract. It’s about what happens when the most powerful pattern-recognition and data-processing systems ever built are handed to agencies with a documented history of constitutional overreach.
Maya Sulkin, posting on X, raised pointed concerns about the trajectory of government AI adoption, highlighting how rapidly these technologies are being deployed without meaningful public debate or legislative guardrails. The concern resonates far beyond tech policy circles. When AI systems capable of analyzing billions of data points per second are deployed by intelligence and law enforcement agencies, the question isn’t whether they’ll be used for mass surveillance. The question is what’s stopping them.
The answer, right now, is almost nothing.
Consider the precedent. The NSA’s bulk metadata collection program, revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013, operated for years under secret legal interpretations that the FISA court rubber-stamped. That program was primitive by today’s standards — it collected phone records. Modern AI systems can correlate phone records with location data, facial recognition feeds, social media activity, financial transactions, and communication patterns simultaneously. The surveillance potential isn’t additive. It’s multiplicative.
And the legal framework hasn’t kept pace. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, reauthorized in 2024, still permits warrantless collection of communications data on foreign targets — but “incidental” collection of American citizens’ data continues at scale. Layer AI-powered analysis on top of that collection, and you don’t need to target Americans directly. The system can identify, profile, and track them as a byproduct of its normal operations.
Not Divided, an organization focused on protecting democratic institutions from technological overreach, has been documenting how AI deployment by government agencies threatens constitutional protections. Their research points to a fundamental asymmetry: the government’s capacity to collect and process data about citizens is growing exponentially, while citizens’ ability to understand, challenge, or even know about that collection remains static. No transparency. No accountability. No meaningful consent.
The Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches was written for a world where searching someone’s papers required physically entering their home. The Supreme Court has updated that understanding — the 2018 Carpenter v. United States decision held that accessing historical cell-site location records constitutes a search requiring a warrant. But Carpenter addressed a single data type from a single source. It said nothing about AI systems that can fuse dozens of data streams into comprehensive behavioral profiles without any individual search ever being conducted.
That’s the gap. And the government is driving a fleet of trucks through it.
The defense establishment’s AI ambitions go far beyond battlefield applications
The Department of Homeland Security has deployed AI-powered systems at the border that use facial recognition, behavioral analysis, and social media monitoring. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has contracted with data brokers who aggregate location data from commercial apps — data that would require a warrant to collect directly but can be purchased on the open market. The FBI’s use of facial recognition technology has been criticized by the Government Accountability Office for lacking adequate privacy safeguards. These aren’t hypothetical risks. They’re current operations.
OpenAI’s entry into this space adds a new dimension. Large language models and multimodal AI systems don’t just process structured data — they can interpret unstructured text, analyze images, understand context, and generate inferences that would take human analysts months to produce. When The New Stack reported on the company’s defense partnerships, the framing centered on cybersecurity and administrative efficiency. But the same models that can summarize intelligence reports can also analyze intercepted communications at population scale. The same computer vision systems that can identify military equipment in satellite imagery can identify individuals in street-level surveillance footage.
The technology is dual-use by nature. The intentions of today’s operators don’t constrain the applications of tomorrow’s.
Some will argue that democratic oversight provides sufficient protection. It doesn’t. Congressional intelligence committees have repeatedly demonstrated they lack the technical expertise to evaluate AI capabilities and the political will to restrict intelligence agencies. The Church Committee reforms of the 1970s, which created the modern oversight framework after revelations of CIA and FBI domestic surveillance programs, were a response to abuses that had already occurred. We’re watching the conditions for similar abuses being assembled in real time, and the response from Congress has been a handful of hearings and zero binding legislation.
The European Union’s AI Act, whatever its flaws, at least attempts to categorize AI applications by risk level and impose restrictions on the most dangerous uses, including real-time biometric surveillance in public spaces. The United States has no equivalent federal framework. Executive orders on AI safety issued by the Biden administration were largely voluntary and have been rolled back. State-level efforts are fragmented and inconsistent.
So where does that leave American citizens?
Exposed. The combination of commercially available personal data, government surveillance authorities that predate the AI era, and AI systems capable of synthesizing both into detailed individual profiles creates conditions the Constitution’s framers could not have anticipated but clearly would have opposed. The right to be left alone — what Justice Brandeis called “the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by a free people” — is being eroded not by a single dramatic act but by the steady accumulation of technical capabilities deployed without democratic authorization.
The tech industry bears responsibility here too. OpenAI’s shift from “we won’t work with the military” to active defense contracting happened without shareholder votes, public referenda, or legislative approval. It was a business decision. The company determined that government contracts were too lucrative and strategically important to forgo, and it adjusted its principles accordingly. Other AI companies — Palantir, Anduril, Scale AI — never pretended to have such reservations. But OpenAI’s reversal matters precisely because it demonstrates that voluntary ethical commitments in the AI industry are worth exactly as much as the paper they’re not printed on.
Groups like Not Divided are pushing for structural reforms: mandatory algorithmic impact assessments before government deployment, warrant requirements for AI-assisted surveillance, independent technical audits of government AI systems, and sunset clauses that force periodic reauthorization. These aren’t radical proposals. They’re the minimum conditions for democratic governance of powerful technologies.
But they face opposition from an intelligence community that views oversight as an obstacle, a defense industry that views AI as its next major revenue stream, and a political class that views “tough on security” as an electoral imperative. The incentives all point in one direction. More collection. More analysis. More power concentrated in agencies that operate largely in secret.
The constitutional question isn’t complicated. The government should not be able to construct detailed profiles of citizens’ movements, associations, communications, and beliefs without individualized suspicion and judicial authorization. AI makes it technically trivial to do exactly that. The law hasn’t caught up. And every month that passes without action makes the gap harder to close.
This isn’t a technology problem. It’s a democracy problem. And right now, democracy is losing.
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