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

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Why buy what they would need a warrant to take?

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 put questions to the DIA about buying Americans’ phone location data without a warrant.

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 permission to search their database of American location data had been granted five times in two and a half years – approved by their own lawyers, their own oversight office and their own senior leadership. 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. In February 2021, 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’s office sent more questions up the chain, to the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. He wanted to know if the rest of the Pentagon was doing the same thing. That follow-up, 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’s own memo says it gets the data by funding another agency that buys 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 sign-offs 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 by the DIA’s reading and Amodei’s, because the data was commercially purchased, not subpoenaed.

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

And the response? The President ordered all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s technology, the Pentagon blacklisted his company, and a top Pentagon official called him a liar with a God complex.

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 passed the House in April 2024 but never passed the Senate.

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

Correction, September 27th, 2026: This essay first said the DIA’s admission answered questions Wyden sent after the Locate X reporting – it answered his office’s own questions to the DIA, and the Locate X questions went up the chain in February 2021. It also said the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act went nowhere – it passed the House in April 2024 but never passed the Senate. It also said the DIA searched its database of Americans’ location data five times with sign-off only from its chief of staff and general counsel – the DIA said permission to search was granted five times, approved by its lawyers, its oversight office and its senior leadership. And it said the Pentagon had the President order agencies to stop using Anthropic’s technology – the President ordered that himself, and then the Pentagon blacklisted the company.

Update, September 27th, 2026: One line now says whose reading of the law makes buying the data legal. Another now says the DIA’s own memo describes how it gets the data – by funding another agency that buys it.

Everything I have written about AI is in one place at rachelandthecity.com/the-ai-files.