thezvi.substack.com/p/anthropic-and-the-department-of-war

Why this is incorrect

The post claims DoD Directive 3000.09 “directly makes any violation of the second red line already illegal,” where the “second red line” earlier in the post is “No kinetic weapons without a human in the kill chain until we’re ready.”

There are two problems with treating DoDD 3000.09 as making violations of that red line “illegal”:

1. A DoD Directive is a policy document, not a statute or criminal law.
   DoD directives are part of the DoD issuances system that establish and guide policy and assign responsibilities/authority inside the department. They are not, by themselves, what makes something “illegal” in the sense of violating a law enacted by Congress (or a regulation with statutory force). This undercuts the claim that the directive “directly makes” a violation “illegal.”

2. DoDD 3000.09 does not simply equate to “human in the kill chain.”
   DoD’s own public description of the directive emphasizes that autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems must be designed to allow “appropriate levels of human judgment” over the use of force.

A Congressional Research Service product further explains that “appropriate” is flexible and that “human judgment over the use of force” does not necessarily require manual human ‘control’ of the weapon system. That is not the same thing as the absolute rule implied by the post’s “human in the kill chain” phrasing.

Because the directive is (a) an internal policy issuance and (b) framed around flexible “appropriate levels of human judgment,” the post’s statement that it “directly makes any violation of the second red line already illegal” overstates what DoDD 3000.09 does and mischaracterizes its legal effect.