Americans Agree: The Government Shouldn't Use AI Tech to Spy on Us

Americans, it turns out, have a clearer view of the AI surveillance debate than most of Washington. A new poll from Americans for Responsible Innovation finds that 76% of Americans oppose allowing the government to force AI companies to hand over unrestricted access to their technology for surveilling citizens. The public, in other words, increasingly understands that our Fourth Amendment protections are under threat.

What is lacking is any action by Congress to protect our rights. Do we want to live in a country where our fundamental rights depend on the terms of service of powerful technology companies? The fight over whether the Pentagon should be able to use frontier AI for mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons has clarified the challenges we all face, especially under an administration with scant regard for the law.

It’s commendable that Anthropic took a principled stance and said no to the Department of Defense (DOD). But it is an outlier, for now. Others, like OpenAI, are eager to profit from the billions in government contracts and swooped in to replace Anthropic.

Frontier AI model companies are also only one part of enabling even more domestic surveillance of US citizens. Other companies, such as Microsoft and Amazon, provide critical infrastructure for AI models. For example, every query the Pentagon runs through GPT, every bulk data analysis, every AI-assisted profile of an American citizen that touches OpenAI’s models runs on Microsoft’s Azure cloud.

American citizens and consumers understand what is at stake here, and that is why an overwhelming majority oppose giving the government unchecked surveillance power.

OpenAI and Microsoft jointly confirmed on February 27 that Azure remains the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI’s APIs, and that any collaboration between OpenAI and a third party, including for government use, is hosted on Azure. Microsoft is the infrastructure. And infrastructure is where surveillance lives. Other companies like Palantir use these models to build surveillance tools. Palantir reportedly has signed a billion-dollar contract with the Department of Homeland Security.

These companies hide behind terms of service, which they claim will stop the government from surveilling US citizens. But these are empty worlds.

OpenAI agreed to DOD terms when Anthropic wouldn't, and then scrambled to dress up the deal with reassuring language after the backlash nearly buried it. Sam Altman himself admitted the whole thing was “rushed” and that “the optics don’t look good,” which is one way to describe handing the Pentagon sweeping AI capabilities while your competitor gets blacklisted for insisting on civil liberties protections.

When The Guardian reported in February that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had more than tripled the data it stores on Azure in just six months, from 400 terabytes to nearly 1,400 terabytes, while deploying Microsoft’s own AI tools to search and analyze images and video, Microsoft responded with a one-liner: Its policies and terms of service “do not allow our technology to be used for the mass surveillance of civilians,” and the company does “not believe ICE is engaged in such activity.” That’s it. That is the entirety of Microsoft’s public position on AI-powered government surveillance in 2026: a terms-of-service claim and a profession of ignorance about what its own customer is doing with its own platform.

This is in contrast to the position Microsoft took in Israel, where last September Microsoft terminated access to Azure for an Israeli military intelligence unit after reporting confirmed the platform was being used for mass surveillance of Palestinians. The company’s president, Brad Smith, then declared that Microsoft prohibits its technology from being used for mass surveillance of civilians “in every country around the world”...except the US it seems.

These companies’ positions are strategically convenient and profitable for them, but untenable for all of us. Legal experts have spent weeks explaining why OpenAI’s revised contract language is insufficient to prevent surveillance, because the operative standard is “consistent with applicable law,” and the US government has historically interpreted that standard to accommodate sweeping surveillance programs.

The same applies to the terms of service of cloud service providers like Microsoft and Amazon. Have these changed substantially since the Snowden revelations that the National Security Agency was conducting mass digital surveillance? Instead of backing down, Amazon, for example, is extending this digital surveillance network into the real world via its Ring service. Dario Amodei is right, what’s at stake now is much larger—“a true panopticon on a scale that we don’t see today, even with the CCP.”

American citizens and consumers understand what is at stake here, and that is why an overwhelming majority oppose giving the government unchecked surveillance power. That kind of consensus is rare in American politics, and it cuts across partisan lines. Congress should act, and companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and the frontier AI companies should be on notice.