Friday, March 06, 2026

SPACE/COSMOS

ESA’s Mars Orbiters Watch Solar Superstorm Hit The Red Planet

To study Mars’s atmosphere, ESA’s two Mars orbiters make use of a technique called ‘radio occultation’. CREDIT: European Space Agency

March 6, 2026

By Eurasia Review

What happens when a solar superstorm hits Mars? Thanks to the European Space Agency’s Mars orbiters, we now know: glitching spacecraft and a supercharged upper atmosphere.

In May 2024, Earth was hit by the biggest solar storm recorded in over 20 years. It sent our planet’s atmosphere into overdrive, triggering shimmering auroras that were seen as far south as Mexico.

This storm also hit Mars. Fortunately, ESA’s two Mars Orbiters – Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) – were in the right place at the right time, with a radiation monitor aboard TGO picking up a dose equivalent to 200 ‘normal’ days in just 64 hours.

A new study to be published in Nature Communications on Thursday 5 March reveals in greater depth how this intense, stormy activity affected the Red Planet.

“The impact was remarkable: Mars’s upper atmosphere was flooded by electrons,” says ESA Research Fellow Jacob Parrott, lead author of the study. “It was the biggest response to a solar storm we’ve ever seen at Mars.”

The superstorm caused a dramatic increase in electrons in two distinct layers of Mars’s atmosphere at altitudes of around 110 and 130 km, with numbers rising by 45% and a whopping 278%, respectively. This is the most electrons we’ve ever seen in this layer of martian atmosphere.

“The storm also caused computer errors for both orbiters – a typical peril of space weather, as the particles involved are so energetic and hard to predict,” adds Jacob. “Luckily, the spacecraft were designed with this in mind, and built with radiation-resistant components and specific systems for detecting and fixing these errors. They recovered fast.”

Pioneering a new technique

To investigate the superstorm’s impact on Mars, Jacob and colleagues used a technique currently being pioneered by ESA known as radio occultation.

First, Mars Express beamed a radio signal to TGO at the very moment it was disappearing over the martian horizon. As TGO vanished, the radio signal was bent (‘refracted’) by the various layers of Mars’s atmosphere before being picked up by the orbiter, allowing scientists to glean more about each layer. The researchers also used observations from NASA’s MAVEN mission to confirm the electron densities.

“This technique has actually been used for decades to explore the Solar System, but using signals beamed from a spacecraft to Earth,” says Colin Wilson, ESA project scientist for Mars Express and TGO, and co-author of the study. “It’s only in the past five years or so that we’ve started using it at Mars between two spacecraft, such as Mars Express and TGO, which usually use those radios to beam data between orbiters and rovers. It’s great to see it in action.”

ESA uses orbiter-to-orbiter radio occultation routinely at Earth, and plans to use it more regularly in future planetary missions.

Different worlds, different weather

The superstorm was experienced very differently at Earth and Mars, highlighting the differences between the two worlds.

At Earth, the response of the upper atmosphere was more muted, thanks to the shielding effect of Earth’s magnetic field. As well as deflecting a lot of solar storm particles away from Earth, the magnetic field also diverted some towards Earth’s poles, where they caused the sky to light up with auroras.

While their differences can make it tricky to compare planets directly, understanding how solar activity impacts the residents of the Solar System – in other words, space weather forecasting – is hugely important. At Earth, solar storms can be dangerous and damaging for astronauts and equipment up in space, and can disrupt our satellites and systems (power, radio, navigation) further down.

However, studying space weather is difficult as the Sun throws out radiation and material erratically, making targeted measurements largely opportunistic. “Fortunately, we were able to use this new technique with Mars Express and TGO just 10 minutes after a large solar flare hit Mars. Currently we’re only performing two observations per week at Mars, so the timing was extremely lucky,” adds Jacob.

Jacob and colleagues captured the aftermath of three solar events – all part of the same storm, but different in terms of what they throw out into space, and how they do it: one flare of radiation, one burst of high-energy particles, and an eruption of material known as a coronal mass ejection (CME).

Together, these events sent fast-moving, energetic, magnetised plasma and X-rays flooding towards Mars. When this barrage of material hit the planet’s upper atmosphere it collided with neutral atoms and stripped away their electrons, causing the region to fill up with electrons and charged particles.

“The results improve our understanding of Mars by revealing how solar storms deposit energy and particles into Mars’s atmosphere – important as we know the planet has lost both huge amounts of water and most of its atmosphere to space, most likely driven by the continual wind of particles streaming out from the Sun,” says Colin.

“But there’s another side to it: the structure and contents of a planet’s atmosphere influence how radio signals travel through space. If Mars’s upper atmosphere is packed full of electrons, this could block the signals we use to explore the planet’s surface via radar, making it a key consideration in our mission planning – and impacting our ability to investigate other worlds.”

Scientists Successfully Harvest Chickpeas From ‘Moon Dirt’

The researchers chose the ‘Myles’ variety of chickpea for this study. Its compact size and resiliency support crop production in space-limited mission environments.

CREDIT: University of Texas Institute for Geophysics

March 6, 2026
By Eurasia Review

As the U.S. plans to return to the moon with the upcoming Artemis II mission, a question endures: What will future lunar explorers eat? According to new research from The University of Texas at Austin the answer might be chickpeas.

Scientists have successfully grown and harvested chickpeas using simulated “moon dirt,” the first instance of this crop produced in this medium. The research, which was conducted in collaboration with Texas A&M University, is described in a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Sara Santos, the principal investigator of the project, said that the work is a giant leap in understanding what it will take to grow food on the lunar surface.

“The research is about understanding the viability of growing crops on the moon,” said Santos, who is a distinguished postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) at the Jackson School of Geosciences. “How do we transform this regolith into soil? What kinds of natural mechanisms can cause this conversion?”

Lunar regolith is the technical term for moon dirt. It lacks the microorganisms and organic material required for plants to live, and while it contains essential nutrients and minerals for plants to grow, it also contains heavy metals that could be toxic to plants.

For their study, the researchers used simulated moon dirt from Exolith Labs, a mix that models the composition of lunar samples brought back by Apollo astronauts.

To create ideal growing conditions in the moon dirt, the team added vermicompost, a byproduct of red wiggler earthworms that’s rich in essential plant nutrients and minerals and has a diverse microbiome. The earthworms create this product by consuming organic material like food scraps or cotton-based clothes and hygiene products that would be otherwise thrown away on missions.

The team then coated the chickpeas with the fungi arbuscular mycorrhizae before planting. The fungi and chickpeas work symbiotically, with the fungi taking up some essential nutrients needed for growth while reducing the uptake of heavy metals.

After that, Santos’ team planted the chickpeas in a mixture of moon dirt and vermicompost in varying proportions.

They found that mixtures of up to 75% moon dirt successfully produced harvestable chickpeas. However, any higher percentage of moon dirt caused issues, with the plants showing signs of stress and early death. The stressed plants survived longer than chickpeas that weren’t inoculated with fungi, showing the importance of their importance to plant health. What’s more, the researchers found that the fungi were able to colonize and survive in the simulant, suggesting they would only need to be introduced one time in a real-world growing setting.

Although harvesting the chickpeas is a big milestone, how the legumes taste and safety is still an open question. The researchers still need to determine the nutritional content of the chickpea and ensure toxic metals were not absorbed during the growing process.

“We want to understand their feasibility as a food source,” said Jessica Atkin, the first author on the paper and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences at Texas A&M University. “How healthy are they? Do they have the nutrients astronauts need? If they aren’t safe to eat, how many generations until they are?”

While this research was initially funded by Santos and Atkin, the project has now been funded by a NASA FINESST grant.

Berlinale crisis: Golden Bear winner İlker Çatak warns of possible German government ‘censorship'

By David Mouriquand

Published on 06/03/2026 - EURONEWS

İlker Çatak, who won this year's top prize at the Berlin Film Festival for this political drama 'Yellow Letters', warns of the consequences of adopting a potential code of conduct for the Berlinale. "We would have to call it what it is: censorship.”

German-Turkish director İlker Çatak, whose film Yellow Letters recently won the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear, has commented on the recommendations made by Germany’s culture ministry after Berlinale boss Tricia Tuttle was threatened with dismissal.

Tuttle’s leadership came under threat after this year’s edition of the festival was overshadowed at first by criticism of silence regarding political debate and then by several filmmakers using their acceptance speeches during the awards ceremony to make pro-Palestinian statements and speak out about Gaza.

There has been a groundswell of support for Tuttle – not only from more than 3,000 film professionals, who signed an open letter stating that the Berlinale’s strength “lies in its ability to hold divergent perspectives and to give visibility to a plurality of voices”.

Backing for Tuttle also came from 32 global film festival directors, including Cannes head Thierry Frémaux, who signed an open letter saying “we need to maintain spaces where discomfort is embraced, where debates can be expansive, where new ideas can propagate and where unexpected – and sometimes conflicting – perspectives are made visible.”

This week, the Berlinale confirmed that Tuttle would remain as director following a supervisory board meeting. It concluded with the festival’s organising committee, KBB, issuing a series of recommendations, including the creation of a code of conduct; training for staff dealing with politically sensitive content; as well as the launch of an independent advisory forum representing diverse social groups, including Jewish voices.

German tabloid paper Bild, which is openly pro-Israel, falsely claimed that a condition of Tuttle’s continued employment would require the Berlinale and its guests to sign off on a new “code of conduct”.

The Berlinale said the supervisory board gave “recommendations rather than conditions related to Tuttle’s continued employment."

İlker Çatak has reacted to the potential adoption of such recommendations.

Director Ilker Catak addresses the audience after accepting the Golden Bear for best film for 'Yellow Letters' - 21 Feb 2026 AP Photo

“An international A‑list festival like the Berlinale, a festival dedicated to the liberal arts, freedom of expression, and cinema in all its diverse voices, must never be subjected to “recommendations” or any form of external directive,” the filmmaker said in a statement for Variety.

“Beyond the inviolability of human rights and, in this case, the German Constitution, nothing may dictate how the festival leadership curates its program,” he added. “Filmmakers and guests must also be free to express everything they wish within this framework. Anything else would constitute blatant state interference in the autonomous exercise of art. We would have to call it what it is: censorship.”

Çatak had previously stated with regards to the potential firing of Tuttle: “Do they even realize that all of us - and I certainly include myself in that - I would never submit another film to the Berlinale”.

Tuttle has three years left on her five-year contract as director of the Berlinale, and all eyes are now on the festival and the German government, which during the closing ceremony was accused by Palestinian director Abdallah Al-Khatib of “being partners in the genocide in Gaza by Israel.” A reference in part to Germany maintaining a staunchly pro-Israel stance, rooted in the weight of historical guilt

Çatak’s timely Berlinale winner Yellow Letters is a political drama starring Özgü Namal and Tansu Biçer as a couple of Turkish artists whose marriage is threatened when they are targeted by the state and lose their jobs and home. It wowed audiences at this year’s Berlinale, with praise focusing on the performances and the way it comments on political persecution in Turkey.

LIBERTARIAN REVISIONIST HISTORY

Rothbard And The American Revolution – OpEd

Murray Rothbard in the mid-1950s. Photo Credit: The Ludwig von Mises Institute

March 6, 2026
By Joseph Solis-Mullen

Americans are taught that the Constitution completed the Revolution. The Articles of Confederation were weak, disorder reigned, Shays’s Rebellion terrified the countryside, and sober statesmen in Philadelphia heroically designed a “more perfect Union,” as the story goes. The Constitution thus appears as the Revolution’s crowning achievement.

But, as Rothbard showed, the Constitution was not the fulfillment of 1776, but rather its undoing.

After all, had the American states not just fought a war to reject centralized control by Parliament in London? Why, scarcely four years after Yorktown, were many of the same revolutionary leaders advocating a new consolidated national authority—one equipped with taxing power, a standing army, supremacy over state laws, and an independent judiciary insulated from direct democratic control?

Indeed, Murray Rothbard’s fifth volume of Conceived in Liberty invites us to reconsider the founding moment not as triumph, but as counter-revolution. And modern revisionist scholarship—from Charles Beard to Michael Klarman—suggests that this interpretation deserves more attention than it typically receives.

The Articles: Chaos or Liberty?

The conventional narrative insists that the Articles of Confederation were a failure. Congress could not tax. It could not regulate commerce effectively. It struggled to service war debts. Shays’s Rebellion seemed to expose fatal weakness, et cetera.

But weakness to whom?

Under the Articles, political authority was radically decentralized. Congress lacked independent revenue and depended upon the states. There was no executive, no national judiciary, no standing army in peacetime. Western territories were promised eventual self-government. From the standpoint of the revolutionary suspicion of centralized power, this arrangement was not an embarrassment—it was the logical extension of 1776.

The Revolution had been fought, after all, against a distant legislature claiming plenary authority over colonial affairs. Parliament taxed without representation. It imposed navigation laws and commercial restrictions. It stationed troops in peacetime. The colonists’ grievance was not merely taxation but consolidation—power drawn away from local institutions into an unaccountable center.

The Articles embodied the opposite principle: sovereignty lodged in the states, with Congress acting as their agent. Yet, by the mid-1780s, a coalition of nationalists argued that this decentralization had gone too far.

Shays’ Rebellion and Elite Fear

Much of the urgency for constitutional reform stemmed from Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts (1786–87). The textbook version describes desperate debtor-farmers rebelling against lawful authority. But as Leonard Richards demonstrated in Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle, the uprising was less a revolt of insolvent peasants than a tax revolt against aggressive debt enforcement and heavy state taxation designed to service war bonds.

Those bonds had often been purchased at steep discounts by speculators—many of them eastern merchants and financiers—who now demanded repayment at face value. The tax burden fell disproportionately on western farmers. When courts began seizing property for unpaid taxes, rebels closed them.

To nationalists, this was not populist protest but democratic excess. For men like George Washington and James Madison, Shays’s Rebellion confirmed their fear that local majorities could threaten property rights and creditor interests.

Here Rothbard’s interpretation converges with Charles Beard’s earlier thesis in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. Beard argued that the Constitution reflected the interests of bondholders, commercial elites, and national creditors who desired a stronger central government to secure public debts and stabilize commerce. Though Beard’s determinism has been criticized, few deny that financial concerns loomed large in Philadelphia.

Michael Klarman’s The Framers’ Coup reinforces this picture. Klarman demonstrates that the Constitution was not the inevitable outcome of national consensus but the product of strategic maneuvering by political elites who capitalized on economic anxiety and fear of disorder. The Philadelphia Convention exceeded its mandate to amend the Articles and instead drafted an entirely new frame of government. Ratification rules were altered to bypass recalcitrant state legislatures in favor of specially-elected conventions.

If the Revolution was a popular uprising against consolidated imperial authority, the Constitution was most definitely an engineered response to popular unrest at home.

From Confederation to Consolidation

The shift was profound. Under the Constitution, Congress received independent taxing power. Federal law became “supreme.” A national judiciary could invalidate state legislation. The executive branch gained energy and permanence. Standing armies were constitutionally permissible. Interstate commerce fell under federal authority.

The logic of 1776 had been inverted. No longer was power presumed to rest with local institutions unless explicitly delegated; instead, the new government possessed enumerated powers whose interpretation would inevitably expand. The Supremacy Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause quickly became such instruments of consolidation.

Nationalists defended these changes as essential to protect liberty. But liberty for whom?

For public creditors and commercial interests, national consolidation promised stability, uniformity, and reliable debt servicing. For slaveholding states, the Constitution protected the institution through clauses safeguarding the slave trade (for twenty years), fugitive slaves, and the three-fifths compromise. Sectional and economic interests aligned behind centralization.

The Constitution did not merely strengthen the union; it fundamentally altered the balance of sovereignty.

Betrayal or Transformation?

To call the Constitution a “betrayal” may sound excessive. After all, the Bill of Rights soon followed, and many Antifederalists ultimately acquiesced. But consider the revolutionary premise: that distant centralized power is dangerous; that standing armies threaten liberty; that taxation requires strict consent; that local self-government is the bulwark of freedom. These were not peripheral complaints, they were the Revolution.

Yet, within a decade of independence, leading revolutionaries endorsed a consolidated national government capable of exercising precisely those powers previously denounced in Parliament. The target had changed; the structure increasingly resembled what had been rejected.

The irony is striking. The same generation that resisted London’s claim of supremacy over colonial legislatures created a federal government with supremacy over the states.
The Counter-Revolution Thesis

None of this requires romanticizing the Articles or denying their weaknesses. Nor does it entail rejecting the Constitution outright. But it does require abandoning the myth of inevitability and the assumption that 1787 simply perfected 1776.

The American Revolution contained competing impulses: radical decentralization and elite consolidation. In Philadelphia, the latter prevailed.

If the Revolution was, in part, a revolt against centralized imperial power, then the Constitution represented not its fulfillment but its redirection. The question that remains is not whether the Constitution established some order (it did); the question is whether, in doing so, it compromised the very anti-centralist principles that animated the break with Britain.

For those willing to revisit the founding without piety, the answer may be uncomfortable.

But history rarely flatters the victors of counter-revolutions.

This article was also published at the Mises Institute

Joseph Solis-Mullen

A graduate of Spring Arbor University and the University of Illinois, Joseph Solis-Mullen is a political scientist and graduate student in the economics department at the University of Missouri. A writer and blogger, his work can be found at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, Eurasia Review, Libertarian Institute, and Sage Advance. You can contact him through his website http://www.jsmwritings.com or find him on Twitter.

SEE

Lysander Spooner - Wikipedia

Archive.orgia802800.us.archive.org/4/items/NoTreasonNo.ViTheConstitutionOfNoAuthority/NoTreasonNo.ViByLysanderSpooner.pdf

The Constitution of No Authority.

Lysander Spooner at Boston in 1870 and 1882, respectively. They were ... of the United States," or any one of them, voluntarily supports the. Constitution.

oll.libertyfund.org/titles/spooner-no-treason-no-i-1867

No Treason. No. I (1867) - Online Library of Liberty

... the American constitution because it justified slavery and otherwise violated individual rights ... I (1867). Lysander Spooner (author). Although this is numbered ...

Nyu.eduwww.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/ECM_PRO_065905.pdf

UNCONSTITUTIONALITY OF SLAVERY - NYU Law

† This article has been transcribed from Lysander Spooner's handwritten version, on file with the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Cooperative-individualism.orgcooperative-individualism.org/alexander-a-john_the-ideas-of-lysander-spooner-1950-jun.pdf

The Ideas of Lysander Spooner Author(s): A. John Alexander Source

... Spooner and the American Letter Mail Co. ... of an innocent one,"27 Spooner had no difficulty in proving that slavery was not mentioned in the Constitution.

Pitzer.edudwardmac.pitzer.edu/ANARCHIST_archives/bright/Spooner/Spooner_1539.02_Bk.pdf

the collected works of lysander spooner (1834-1886), in 5 vols. vol ...

This facsimile PDF is published by Liberty Fund, Inc., a non-profit educational foundation established to encourage study of the ideal of a society of free and ...

FOR A SIMILAR ARGUMENT ABOUT THE CANADIAN CONSTITUTION SEE

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: 1867 Speech of Louis-Joseph Papineau at the Institut canadien

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: I Am Canadien

US labels Anthropic a supply chain risk in clash over military AI use

By Roselyne Min with AP

Published on 06/03/2026 - EURONEWS

The Trump administration’s unprecedented move against Anthropic over AI safeguards is forcing government contractors to reconsider their use of the company’s chatbot Claude.

The US administration is following through with its threat to designate artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic as a supply chain risk in an unprecedented move that could force other government contractors to stop using the AI chatbot, Claude.

The Pentagon said in a statement Thursday that it has “officially informed Anthropic leadership that the company and its products are deemed a supply chain risk, effective immediately.”

The decision appeared to shut down the opportunity for further negotiation with Anthropic, nearly a week after President Donald Trump and defence secretary Pete Hegseth accused the company of endangering national security.

Trump and Hegseth announced a series of threatened punishments last Friday, on the eve of the Iran war, after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused to back down over concerns the company’s products could be used for mass surveillance of Americans or autonomous weapons.

Amodei said in a statement Thursday that “we do not believe this action is legally sound, and we see no choice but to challenge it in court.”

"This has been about one fundamental principle: the military being able to use technology for all lawful purposes," the Pentagon statement said.

"The military will not allow a vendor to insert itself into the chain of command by restricting the lawful use of a critical capability and put our warfighters at risk,“ it added.

Amodei countered that the narrow exceptions Anthropic sought to limit surveillance and autonomous weapons “relate to high-level usage areas, and not operational decision-making”.

He added there were “productive conversations” with the Pentagon in recent days over whether it could keep using Claude or establish a “smooth transition” if no agreement was reached.

Trump gave the military six months to phase out Claude, which is already widely embedded in military and national security platforms. Amodei said it’s a priority to make sure warfighters won’t be “deprived of important tools in the middle of major combat operations.”

Some military contractors were already cutting ties with Anthropic, a rising star in the tech industry that sells Claude to a variety of businesses and government agencies.

Defence company Lockheed Martin said it will “follow the President’s and the Department of War’s direction” and look to other providers of large language models.

“We expect minimal impacts as Lockheed Martin is not dependent on any single LLM vendor for any portion of our work,” the company said.

How the US Defence Department will interpret the scope of the risk designation is unclear. Amodei said a notification Anthropic received from the Pentagon on Wednesday shows it only applies to Claude's use by customers as a “direct part of” their military contracts.

Microsoft said its lawyers studied the rule and the company “can continue to work with Anthropic on non-defence related projects.”

Pentagon draws criticism for its decision

The Pentagon's decision to apply a rule designed to address supply threats posed by foreign adversaries was met with broad criticism. Federal codes have defined supply chain risk as a “risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert” a system in order to disrupt, degrade or spy on it.

US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and Senate Intelligence Committee, called it “a dangerous misuse of a tool meant to address adversary-controlled technology.”

“This reckless action is shortsighted, self-destructive, and a gift to our adversaries,” she said in a written statement Thursday.

Neil Chilson, a Republican former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission who now leads AI policy at the Abundance Institute, said the decision looks like “massive overreach that would hurt both the US AI sector and the military’s ability to acquire the best technology for the US warfighter.”

Earlier in the day, a group of former defence and national security officials sent a letter to US lawmakers expressing “serious concern” about the designation.

“The use of this authority against a domestic American company is a profound departure from its intended purpose and sets a dangerous precedent,” said the letter from former officials and policy experts, including former CIA director Michael Hayden and retired Air Force, Army and Navy leaders.

They added that such a designation is meant to “protect the United States from infiltration by foreign adversaries — from companies beholden to Beijing or Moscow, not from American innovators operating transparently under the rule of law. Applying this tool to penalise a US firm for declining to remove safeguards against mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons is a category error with consequences that extend far beyond this dispute.”

Anthropic sees boost in consumer downloads

While losing big partnerships with defence contractors, Anthropic experienced a surge of consumer downloads over the past week due to people siding with its moral stance. More than a million people signed up for Claude each day this week, the company said, lifting it past OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini as the top AI app in more than 20 countries in Apple's app st

The dispute with the Pentagon has also further deepened Anthropic's bitter rivalry with OpenAI, which started when ex-OpenAI leaders, including Amodei, started Anthropic in 2021.

Hours after the Pentagon punished Anthropic last Friday, OpenAI announced a deal to effectively replace Anthropic with ChatGPT in classified military environments.

OpenAI said it sought similar protections against domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, but later had to amend its agreements, leading CEO Sam Altman to say he shouldn't have rushed a deal that “looked opportunistic and sloppy.”

Amodei also expressed regret about his own part in that “difficult day for the company,” saying Thursday he wanted to “directly apologise” for an internal note he sent to Anthropic staff that attacked OpenAI's behaviour and suggested Anthropic was being punished for not giving ”dictator-like praise" to Trump.

AI on the battlefield: How is the US integrating AI into its military?

By Anna Desmarais

Published on 06/03/2026 - EURONEWS

The US military used Anthropic's Claude AI, but after Anthropic refused to remove guardrails against mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, the Pentagon cancelled the contract and turned to OpenAI.

Media reports that the US military used Anthropic’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Claude during operations targeting leaders in Venezuela and Iran are raising new questions about how quickly artificial intelligence (AI) is being integrated into warfare

American media reported that Claude was used to help facilitate a January operation that led to the capture of Venezuela’s leader Nicolás Maduro. Similar reports later emerged that the chatbot was also used during preparations for an operation targeting Iran’s deceased supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Experts say the incidents offer a rare glimpse into how advanced AI systems may already be supporting US military planning and intelligence work.

“It was very surprising to see the sudden deployment of these tools, especially when I think the larger community does not think that they’re ready for said deployment,” said Heidy Khlaaf, chief AI scientist at US policy thinktank, AI Now Institute.

“We’re sort of questioning whether these AI models can be successful in any military settings at all because of how flawed they are,” she told Euronews Next.

Khlaaf said researchers have warned that large language models can produce unreliable or incorrect outputs, raising concerns about how they might perform in high-stakes environments such as military operations.

The reported use of Claude also comes as the Trump administration pushes an ambitious strategy to make the US military “AI-first”, arguing that rapid adoption of the technology is necessary to compete with rivals such as China.

‘We see this sense of urgency’

The United States has used various forms of automation technology in the military since the 2010s, and it has been a focus area for several presidents, including Trump’s predecessors, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, experts told Euronews Next.

Early AI models were used for logistics, maintenance, or translations, according to Elke Schwarz, a professor of political theory at Queen Mary University of London in the United Kingdom.

Trump’s second mandate accelerates the adoption of generative artificial intelligence (AI) models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude in an “AI-arms race,” against the country’s adversaries, both Schwarz and Khlaaf said.

America’s policies give a “sense of urgency” to develop AI because it is a “very valuable technology” that will keep the country ahead of its rivals, said Giorgos Verdi, policy fellow at the European Council of Foreign Relations think tank.

The Department of War’s AI Acceleration strategy aims to secure American military dominance by eliminating barriers to AI integration and investing in strategic projects that will keep the military ahead of rivals.

“The idea really is to bring AI into all kinds of domains, including the harmless ones, but also the more harmful ones,” Schwartz said.

He noted that previous administrations were more cautious about establishing safety guardrails governing how and when such technologies could be used.

As part of that effort, the acceleration strategy has a database called genai.mil, which allows bureaucrats to access AI chatbots, including Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok.

The administration’s 2025 budget, called the “Big Beautiful Bill,” also includes hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for AI-related military projects.

The document sets aside $650 million (€550million) for military innovation, including $145 (€123 million) to develop AI-powered counter-drone systems.

Another $250 million would go toward the “advancement of the AI ecosystem,” while a further $250 million is allocated to expand artificial intelligence capabilities at a Cyber Command centre. An additional $115 million is earmarked for accelerating nuclear national security missions using AI.

US military still in ‘trial phase’ with AI chatbots

Due to the“inherent lack of transparency,” it is difficult to determine how advanced the US government is in its plans, Schwarz said. “Unlike a certain ammunition or a specific physical weapon system, you don’t really see what is being used,” she said. “Everything happens in an interface and very much in the zone of invisibility.”

Schwarz believes that the US military is in a “trial phase,” where it is experimenting with different AI companies to understand what they can do and where their limitations lie.

Anthropic’s $200 million partnership with the US military is for a two-year prototype that will advance national security, the company says. It will work with the department to “anticipate and mitigate potential adversarial uses of AI,” and identify any risks with adopting the technology throughout the “defence enterprise.”

Schwartz said this suggests that the systems are being tested in live environments, which she said raises ethical concerns.

“This isa terrible practice for something that involves human lives,” she said.

However, Verdi believes that systems like Claude that were used in the Venezuelan and Iranian contexts for “more mundane tasks,” such as collecting or analysing satellite images.

“A human may not be able to analyse every single piece of intelligence coming in. That’s what the AI system will be able to do more quickly,” he said. “Then, the humans interpret the outputs of the AI system and then act.”

Experts warn of growing interest in AI-powered autonomous weapons

The researchers worry that the growing role of AI in US military planning and decision-making could eventually lead to the development of autonomous weapons.

“I think there is definitely an interest to at least have the option to develop fully autonomous AI-enabled weapons and potentially make use of those,” Verdi said.

Autonomous weapons could be any weapon that could identify, select, and engage with a target without having a human involved in the final decision, Khlaaf said.

“So instead of taking a recommendation from a large language model and a human acting on it or choosing not to, you would then have that be completely automated away,” she said.

One of the main arguments for developing such systems is the fear that the US could fall behind if a rival builds them first, Verdi said.

However, there is no public information suggesting that China has integrated AI in any way into its military, Verdi and Khlaaf said.

The Chinese are “very concerned about keeping that technology under control,” Verdi added.

The AI capabilities of other American opponents, such as Russia, Iran or North Korea, are “even less sophisticated,” Verdi added, so it is even less likely that those countries would have AI autonomous weapons.

Creating fully autonomous weapons with AI can also lead to escalation in a conflict, Verdi said.

A recent pre-print study from King’s College London found that AI chatbots almost always chose to threaten nuclear weapons use in a war game scenario.

Pentagon faces ‘challenging transition’ away from Claude

Verdi said that we should expect the US to continue using Claude or another AI chatbot in their operations because both Venezuela and Iran were “seemingly very effective,” in fulfilling the mission’s objectives.

The perceived success of these missions creates a risk that the US will want to drop even more guardrails, such as human oversight, to make the technology even more effective, she added. The challenge for the Department of War will be to find a model that works as well as Claude, Verdi said.

The government will be phasing it out in the next six months since the company refused to give the military unfettered access to its technology for what Anthropic claims could be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapon development, according to a statement from Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of War.

Anthropic said Claude has been rolled out throughout the US government's classified information networks, deployed at national nuclear laboratories, and does intelligence analysis directly for the Department of War.

Meanwhile, the Department of War signed a contract with OpenAI to integrate “advanced AI systems in classified environments,” hours after the Anthropic deal was scrapped.

“I think the Department of War will be looking at a challenging transition, but at the same time, it is not an impossible task,” to replace Claude with a new AI system, he said.

The intelligence collected and provided by Claude will likely stay with the department and could be used by the next provider, he said.