The Pentagon Already Buys Your Location Data Without a Warrant. Now Imagine AI.

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This is why Anthropic decided to put the brakes on what the DOD could do with Claude.

The Defense Intelligence Agency — the Pentagon’s own spy shop — admitted in January 2021 that it was buying Americans’ cell phone location data off the open market. No warrant. No court order. Just a credit card and a data broker.

This came out because Senator Ron Wyden asked. Specifically, his office sent questions to the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security after Vice’s Motherboard reported that U.S. Special Operations Command had been purchasing access to a tool called Locate X — which tracks people using location data harvested from everyday phone apps. Wyden wanted to know if the rest of the Pentagon was doing the same thing.

The answer was worse than expected.

The DIA’s response was remarkably casual about the whole thing. These documents confirm they buy commercial location data generated by apps on people’s smartphones. They confirm the data is global, meaning it includes Americans’ locations mixed in with everyone else’s. They confirm they don’t get a warrant first. And here’s the part that should make your jaw hit the floor: they admitted they’d queried their database of American location data five times in two and a half years, authorized only by the DIA chief of staff and general counsel. Not a judge. Not a court. Their own people signing off on searching their own database.

The legal gymnastics are something.

In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States that law enforcement needs a warrant to get cell phone location records from carriers. It was a landmark Fourth Amendment case — the Court said tracking someone’s movements through their phone constitutes a search. But the DIA looked at that ruling and decided it only applies to data obtained through legal process from phone companies. If you just buy the same data from a commercial broker? Different situation entirely, according to them.

The document literally says the DIA “does not construe the Carpenter decision to require a judicial warrant endorsing purchase or use of commercially-available data for intelligence purposes.”

Read that again.

The Supreme Court says the government needs a warrant to track your location through your phone. The DIA says cool, we’ll just buy that same data from someone else instead. Loophole city.

And it wasn’t just the DIA. Wyden’s follow-up investigation, detailed in a May 2021 letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, revealed the Pentagon was conducting broader warrantless surveillance of Americans. Some of the answers the DoD gave were classified. One answer in particular was classified. Wyden couldn’t even tell the public what he’d learned.

The DIA also funds another agency that purchases geolocation metadata aggregated from smartphones — so the pipeline goes even deeper than one agency with a shopping habit. And each DoD component apparently gets to decide for itself whether what it’s doing is legal. As Wyden put it, the government was just going out and purchasing Americans’ private records from “sleazy and unregulated commercial data brokers who are simply above the law.”

Now fast forward to last week.

Dario Amodei — the CEO of Anthropic, the company that makes Claude — got into a standoff with the Pentagon over exactly this issue. His two red lines for military use of AI? Mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. The Pentagon wanted Anthropic to agree its AI could be used for “all lawful purposes.” Anthropic said no — because “lawful” is doing a lot of heavy lifting when the law hasn’t caught up to what AI can do.

Here’s what Amodei told CBS News: the government can buy data collected by private firms and have AI analyze it en masse. That actually isn’t illegal. It was just never useful before the era of AI.

He’s describing exactly what the DIA admitted to doing in 2021 — except now imagine that capability supercharged by artificial intelligence. Instead of five manual queries in two and a half years, you could have an AI system continuously analyzing the location patterns of every American whose phone pinged a cell tower. Where they go. Who they meet. What patterns emerge. All technically legal because the data was commercially purchased, not subpoenaed.

That’s the gap Amodei was trying to close with a contract clause.

And the Pentagon’s response was to blacklist his company, call him a liar with a God complex, and have the President order all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s technology.

The DIA memo from 2021 isn’t ancient history. It’s the receipts. It’s documented proof that the Pentagon already does what Amodei is worried about — just at 2021 speeds. The question isn’t whether the government would use AI to supercharge warrantless surveillance of Americans. The question is why anyone thinks they wouldn’t, given they already admitted to doing the manual version and decided they didn’t need permission.

Wyden proposed the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act to force agencies to get warrants for purchased data. It had bipartisan support. It went nowhere.

So here we are. The Pentagon buying your location data without a warrant. The Supreme Court’s privacy protections being circumvented through commercial purchases. A tech CEO trying to prevent AI from making it exponentially worse. And the government’s response is to punish the company raising the alarm.

America, fuck yeah!

Sources