An Open Letter to Congress on Military AI, Democratic Oversight, and the Cost of Principle
James Tissot (Nantes, France, 1836–1902, Chenecey–Buillon, France). Jesus Before Pilate, Second Interview (Jésus devant Pilate. Deuxième entretien), 1886–1894.
“Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. 2 Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. 3 For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, 4 for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer. 5 Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience. 6 For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. 7 Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed.”
The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2025), Ro 13:1–7.
This is addressed to the United States Congress. But it is written for anyone who believes that how a democracy builds its weapons matters as much as whether those weapons work.
I am a former Army logistician. I have seen war from the supply side. I am also a technologist who works with advanced AI systems. I am writing because those two worlds are converging in ways that most Americans cannot yet see, and because the people who are supposed to provide oversight appear to be largely absent from the process.
The Pentagon has struck a deal with OpenAI permitting “any lawful use” or “all lawful purposes” of frontier AI by the Department of War. Around the same time, another leading AI lab, Anthropic, sought binding contractual prohibitions on two things: mass domestic surveillance of U.S. persons, and fully autonomous weapons that can select and engage human targets without meaningful human oversight. When Anthropic refused to weaken those red lines, it was reportedly designated a “supply chain risk.”
A domestic company was penalized by the procurement apparatus of the United States government for insisting on stronger civil liberties protections than the government was willing to accept.
That is a signal about what kind of AI governance we are building.
“Any Lawful Use” Is Not a Limit. It is a Blank Check.
The phrase “any lawful use” sounds like a constraint. It is not. It is a delegation.
It does not refer to clear, democratically debated statutes about how frontier AI may be used in war or surveillance. It points into a thicket of existing surveillance authorities, secret court interpretations, and internal DoW legal opinions that ordinary citizens—and most members of Congress—cannot read, contest, or even see. Decisions about whether AI systems can be used for mass domestic surveillance or for automated targeting and lethal force workflows are being made inside classified procurement processes and executive-branch legal memos, not in open hearings or public law.
This is a structural bypass of domestic governance. The decisions are happening. The debate is not.
The laws of war, the Fourth Amendment, the basic question of when and how the state may watch and kill in our name—these are not matters that should be settled by what a government lawyer can argue technically permissible in a classified annex to a defense contract. They are matters for public deliberation and legislative action. That is what Congress is for.
Punishing Principle Creates a Race to the Bottom
When the government designates a company a “supply chain risk” for drawing ethical lines, it does not merely punish that one company. It broadcasts a lesson to every other firm in the industry: compliance pays; principle is a liability.
This is precisely backwards. A constitutional democracy should create incentives that reward companies insisting on higher standards—not lower ones. If the most capable AI labs learn that demanding real constraints will cost them federal contracts while acquiescence will be rewarded, we will not end up with a defense AI ecosystem that takes civil liberties and the laws of war seriously. We will end up with one that has been quietly trained not to.
The “supply chain risk” designation applied to Anthropic deserves congressional scrutiny on its own terms. But the larger issue is the incentive structure it reveals and reinforces. We should not be building a sovereign AI stack on a foundation that punishes conscience.
Change the Target
Now perform a simple substitution. Keep the mechanism exactly as it is. Change only the name of the institution it is aimed at.
Imagine a Southern Baptist, Adventist, or Catholic hospital network that holds federal contracts for Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements. In the course of renegotiating that relationship, the government demands the network perform procedures that violate its foundational moral commitments. The network declines, breaking no law and does not go to court. It simply holds its line and says: this is where we stand.
And then it is designated a supply chain risk.
It is not prosecuted or legislated against. No bill is passed, no public hearing held, and no judge consulted. Just an administrative label, applied internally, that makes the institution’s continued operation contingent on the goodwill of a contracting agency. The hospital does not close overnight, but it simply finds its exemptions are under review, its contracts are not renewed, and its accreditations require fresh scrutiny. The pressure would be real and the paper trail thin. Contestation would be slow and expensive. And the message to every other religious institution watching is identical to the one sent to every other AI lab watching Anthropic, that compliance pays. Principle is a liability.
This is the shape of the tool that was already used against Anthropic. The target was an AI company. The mechanism does not care about the targets.
I want to be careful here, as I am not claiming this is the government’s present intention toward churches or religious institutions. But I am saying that the tool exists, and that it has already been used as described. The sovereign AI stack being assembled around the mechanism will make the tool dramatically more capable—faster, cheaper, quieter, and harder to contest than it is today. You do not need malicious intent for a powerful tool to cause serious harm. You only need the tool to exist and the constraints on its use to be weak.
This is why US constitutional architecture matters to everyone—why it should matter to everyone, and not only to technologists or civil libertarians, but to every institution that has ever looked at a government demand and said: there are things we will not do.
The Sovereign AI Stack and the Hollowing of Bicameral Democracy
There is a longer game being played here, and it concerns me more than any single contract.
The United States is quietly assembling what might be called a sovereign AI stack: a fusion of state authority with corporate cloud and AI infrastructure that centralizes enormous power over data, perception, targeting, and decision-making in a layer that Congress neither designed, nor meaningfully controls. When that stack is fed by pervasive surveillance, governed by the executive-corporate nexus, and tied to frontier AI systems with poorly bounded capabilities, it creates a path around the normal friction of democratic governance, that is, around bicameral negotiation, public debate, judicial scrutiny, and the slower deliberative processes that exist precisely to prevent the concentration of unchecked power.
Policy can be implemented as code and contracts long before, or entirely instead of, statute. The more a society’s critical functions run through this stack, the easier it becomes to hollow out democratic institutions while continuing to speak their language.
I want to be direct about what I am describing. I am describing a structural tendency that is already in motion, in procurement documents and legal interpretations that most elected officials have not read and most citizens do not know exist. A sovereign AI stack left unaddressed by law does not need to be malicious to erode democracy. It only needs to be faster than the legislative process—and it already is.
What I Am Asking Congress to Do
I am not asking you to ignore legitimate national security concerns, nor am I pretending our adversaries are standing still. I am, rather, asking you to insist that the United States pursue its security without sacrificing the democratic architecture that makes that security worth having.
Hold public hearings on military AI contracts. Require senior DoW officials and executives from major AI labs to testify, in public, about the terms under which their systems may be used for surveillance, targeting, and autonomous operations. Make the standard “lawful use” clauses visible to the degree possible. Sunlight is not a threat to national security. Unaccountable power is.
Legislate hard red lines. At a minimum, Congress should establish clear statutory prohibitions—enforceable in court—on using frontier AI systems for mass, suspicion-less domestic surveillance of U.S. persons, and on deploying fully autonomous lethal systems that can select and engage human targets without meaningful human control and accountability. These limits should not live in internal Pentagon policy or private contractual language. They should be law.
Require democratic review of high-risk AI deployments. Any deployment of frontier AI into intelligence or lethal-force workflows should trigger mandatory reporting and review by Congress, and where appropriate, independent oversight bodies. “Any lawful use” should not function as a blanket carve-out. Specific categories of use should be subject to affirmative legislative authorization.
Protect companies that draw ethical lines. Investigate the supply chain risk designation applied to Anthropic and ensure that federal procurement is not being used to retaliate against firms that insist on stronger civil liberties and safety safeguards. Create affirmative incentives—not just the absence of punishment—for defense contractors who embed higher-law standards into their systems.
Develop a doctrine on sovereign AI and democracy. Begin building a bipartisan framework that recognizes how a sovereign AI stack, left to develop without democratic constraint, can undermine bicameralism, federalism, and individual civic standing. Where AI infrastructure becomes part of the state’s nervous system, democratic controls must be stronger, not weaker.
A Higher Law for Our Machines
I am a Christian. I do not expect the United States to legislate theology, and I am not asking it to.
But I do believe that our tools—including our most powerful ones—must ultimately answer to something above raw expedience. Our Constitution, the laws of war, and the basic moral recognition that we must not normalize total surveillance or machine-delegated killing. These are not sectarian commitments. They are the load-bearing walls of a civilization that takes human dignity seriously.
Our current policy trajectory says: if it can be fit under “any lawful use” as interpreted behind closed doors by executive branch lawyers, it is acceptable to build, buy, and deploy. That is not a standard. That is an abdication.
As a veteran, I know there is no way to participate in war without moral paradox. I have made peace with that, as much as anyone can. But the outer limits of what we permit ourselves to do—the lines we will not cross regardless of what we could technically justify—are supposed to be set by the people’s representatives, in public, through deliberation. That is not a naive ideal. It is the design of the republic.
You have the authority to change the trajectory we are on. I am asking you to use it by bringing these contracts into the open, setting real limits in law, and ensuring that the AI systems being woven into our security apparatus serve democratic order rather than quietly supplanting it.
The machines we build will carry the values we embed in them, or the values we failed to insist upon. Choose carefully. Choose in public. Choose now.
David Michael Moore is a former U.S. Army Reserve Logistician and a technologist working with advanced AI systems.
If this letter reaches you and you are not a member of Congress: you can act too. Contact your representatives. Share this. The deliberation this moment requires cannot happen without public pressure to have it.