The danger isn’t AI that wages war. It’s AI that makes war abstract enough to wage forever.

In Season 1 of Star Trek: The Original Series, the episode "A Taste of Armageddon" imagined a civilization that had been at war for 500 years — but fought entirely by computer simulation. When the algorithm registered casualties, citizens voluntarily reported to disintegration chambers to be executed. The war was clean, orderly, and endless — because it had been stripped of the horror that might otherwise force a peace.

This week, Anthropic refused to let the Pentagon use Claude for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. Trump responded by banning them from all federal contracts and threatening criminal consequences.

I couldn't stop thinking about that episode.

Full essay here.