Senator Ron Wyden weighed in on Anthropic’s fight with the Defense Department over potential mass surveillance of Americans. The Democrat from Oregon says that all of our data, from location information to web browsing habits, is available for purchase in ways that should concern Americans. And he plans to fight the government through the law.

“The Department of Defense has placed a suit on Anthropic that asks for minimum ethical standards for how the DOD uses its product. That is a serious cause for alarm, given the ability of AI to turn various pieces of public or commercial data into more revealing profiles of Americans,” Wyden said.

At issue is Anthropic’s refusal to use Claude for fully autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of Americans, two use cases the AI ​​company discussed in a public letter on Wednesday.

President Donald Trump announced on Friday that the federal government will stop using the Anthropic AI model Claude, which the Defense Department has been using for six months. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said any company that wants to do business with the government must also stop working with Anthropic, a claim guaranteed to be challenged in the courts. Anthropic has said it will sue.

Wyden, a longtime privacy advocate, warned that the DOD’s data collection occurred through private data brokers, and if the government was able to combine all of this data, it could create a profile of every American.

“Location data, web browsing records, and information about mental health, political activities and religious affiliations are all available for pennies on the open market and can target Americans for doing things that are perfectly legal,” Wyden said.

All the data can be collected in a way that may surprise the average American. For example, 404 Media has a new report which shows how the Department of Homeland Security is buying location data obtained from ads served on mobile phones. Users have no idea they are being tracked by seemingly harmless games and apps on their phones, but DHS is buying this data for cheap.

“I’ve been warning for almost a decade that the data available for procurement from companies is just as sensitive as the information collected directly by the government.

Greg Nojeim, the director of the Center for Democracy and Technology Project on Security and Surveillance, told Gizmodo that the DOD is buying commercially available information on Americans, and it’s technically legal now.

“There’s an entire industry of data brokers buying and selling location information about Americans,” Nojeim said. “This data broker industry is largely unregulated at the federal level, and the Department of Defense enters into contracts to purchase such data. Apparently, it wants to reserve Anthropic’s AI to analyze that data and extract intelligence from it, even if the data relates to Americans.”

The Pentagon is trying to pressure Anthropic and make an example out of the company. President Trump will not tolerate dissent of any kind, and trying to put up even the most basic guardrails against something like mass surveillance of Americans is seen as beyond the pale by Trump and his cronies. But Democrats are trying to fight back.

Wyden has two pieces of legislation related to the purchase of commercial data, the Fourth Amendment Not For Sale Act and the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act. With Democrats in the minority in the House and Senate, that legislation has little chance of becoming law until they regain both chambers and the presidency.

The Fourth Amendment’s Not For Sale Act passed the House in 2024 under the presidency of Joe Biden but failed in the Senate.