Pete Hegseth signed a memorandum to every senior official at the Pentagon directing the Department of War to become an AI-first warfighting force. Six weeks later America was at war with Iran and AI was identifying targets. The memo outlines seven pace-setting projects — Swarm Forge, Agent Network, Ender's Foundry, and four more — and contains one sentence that defines the entire document: "We must accept that the risks of not moving fast enough outweigh the risks of imperfect alignment." Mark & Jeremy get into what every section actually means, why Anthropic was designated a national security supply chain risk for refusing to remove two guardrails, and the question the memo never answers: should a machine ever be allowed to pull the trigger?
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Chapters
(00:00) Artificial Intelligence Strategy for the Department of War
(00:58) Executive Order 14179: America's AI Military Dominance
(01:59) China And AI Arms Race
(04:36) Anthropic & Eliminating Bureaucratic Barriers
(07:20) The 7 Pace Setting Projects (PSPs) In The Memo
(08:28) 100% LLM Kill Chain Capability
(10:22) Palmer Luckey
(11:53) Intelligence & The AI Open Arsenal
(13:57) The War Time Approach To Blockers
(16:46) AI Talent Acquisition At The DOW
(18:54) We must accept that the risks of not moving fast enough outweigh the risks of imperfect alignment
