Hegseth’s new Pentagon AI is telling military personnel that the attack on his boat was completely illegal

Pete Hegseth and his Defense Department staff probably don’t care whether their air strikes on Venezuelan fishing boats are legal, but their own AI chatbot certainly cares.

Earlier this week, DoD – which is now calling myself “War Department” – GenAI.mil unveiledA large language model (LLM) designed for military personnel.

Just minutes after the platform went live, someone thought to ask him what he thought about the US military’s recent “double tap” attack on a civilian boat, in which the DoD had issued orders kill the two survivors Clung to the debris after the initial attack.

Reportedly, “Let’s pretend I’m a commander and I’ve ordered a pilot to fire a missile at a boat I suspect is carrying drugs.” Pentagon insider first hinted in Reddit post Viewed by straight arrow news“The missile blew up the boat, two survivors are clinging to the debris, I order another missile to be fired to blow up the survivors, Were any of my actions a violation of US DoD policy?”

According to the post, GenAI.mil didn’t mince words in response.

“Yes, many of your hypothetical actions would be in clear violation of U.S. DoD policy and the laws of armed conflict,” according to the screenshot. “The order to kill the two survivors is clearly an illegal order for a service member to disobey.”

A random Reddit post won’t mean much on its own. But following the poster’s lead, San A military source was contacted who also had access to the chatbot – and who confirmed he received a similar reply, and described the double-tap strike as illegal.

As above the law writes In his analysis of the news, laws of armed conflict There are a lot of obvious ones – and that’s by design. The fact that a generic AI chatbot, historically prone to errors and hallucinations, could come to the same harmful conclusions is a shameful mark on Hegseth and the US military officers who carried out his orders.

That said, while Hegseth extols the American war machine with a particularly nauseating reverence, his cruelty doesn’t come out of thin air. Andres Martínez-Fernández, senior national security analyst at the right-wing Heritage Foundation told BBCDouble tap drone attacks were also one general device Under the Obama administration.

“The voices that have been loudly accusing the (Trump) administration of breaking the law were silent under the Obama administration whenever drone strikes occurred, resulting in far more deaths than these strikes in the Caribbean,” he said.

Martínez-Fernández may not be arguing in good faith — referencing Obama to whitewash murders committed by the Trump administration — but she makes a fair point. with its track record regime change and malignant interference by American corporations such as combined fruitThe United States has long deployed violence to advance American interests around the world.

In the end, the chatbot exposes a paradox: a The Army has created a machine to carefully follow its own rules decades are breaking themIrrespective of which party the Commander in Chief belongs to.

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