Government Isn't Doing Better on AI Than on UFOs

 

 

“Remember the late Biden-era drone panic over loss of control of the national airspace? You're seeing something similar now over artificial intelligence.

 

Recall that earlier episode. In 2020, on the Tyler Cowen podcast, Obama CIA chief John Brennan responded to UFO sightings over U.S. military training ranges by clearly suggesting alien life. The backfilling has been hasty since then. In short order came a strange succession of unclassified assessments from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the first pointing to mysterious technologically impossible objects over U.S. military sites, the second walking it all back. Ditto a reversal by NASA, whose then-leader enjoyed burbling in public about aliens but was soon assembling an expert panel to debunk such careless if crowd-pleasing talk.

 

By February of last year, I was taxing leaders of the Air Force's Barksdale B-52 base about the real problem, which government leaks even now admitted -- conventional drones likely operated by unfriendly powers within U.S. airspace. This March, swarms of apparently unjammable drones appeared in restricted airspace above Barksdale itself. On June 15, a B-52 crashed on takeoff in California for unexplained reasons. Who didn't immediately wonder, "Drone?"

 

It may be hard to get your mind around, but the U.S. government is similarly panicked now over potential loss of control of its information domain thanks to artificial intelligence. As with UFOs, the press has generally played a gullible, distracting role, focusing on Terminator robots and AI-caused mass unemployment. A lot more telling was a Pentagon signal in 2018. It conspicuously added strategic cyberattacks to the short list of provocations that might prompt a U.S. nuclear response. Then came an early 2025 paper by former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and colleagues. It warned that China might pre-emptively strike U.S. data centers if it feared it was losing the race to artificial superintelligence.

 

What was perceived as incipient became urgent with the arrival of Mythos in April. This latest Anthropic model was held back from public distribution because it might be used to organize economy-wrecking cyberhacks. There followed a Trump executive order asking model makers voluntarily to submit their products for federal review. More recently, it took draconian steps to force Anthropic to withdraw even a guardrailed version from the market.

 

Anthropic and its two closest peers, OpenAI and Alphabet, are accustomed to rolling out upgraded and more capable models every few months to the general public. For now that's stopped. Here things stand without some coherent government leadership.

 

The industry's investment-heavy business approach can quickly blow up if it can't release its products to customers.

 

Yann LeCun, Meta's former chief AI scientist, is among a minority who say America's AI leaders only hoist themselves by exaggerating both the progress and danger of their latest models. Unfortunately, government fears don't have to be accurate or well-calibrated if they cut to the heart of government's prestige and legitimacy. The large potential benefits to society of AI Washington might willingly throw away to avoid such risks to itself.

 

People have been identifying and failing to identify objects in the sky forever. This has made the UFO miasma a ready resort, since early in the last Cold War, for the U.S. government to misdirect public attention from its own miscues. So far 100% of identified objects haven't been alien spacecraft, yet people like Steven Spielberg treat the simple fact of unidentified sightings as proof not only of alien visitation, but of government conspiracies.

 

Americans are especially prone to such invented suspicions when they sense that sources they should be able to trust are lying to them. This problem our politicians and press have recently amplified -- lies by Donald Trump's enemies about his Russian connections and Hunter Biden's laptop, lies by Mr. Trump about the 2020 election, lies about Covid, about the value and shortcomings of vaccines, about Jeffrey Epstein, about President Biden's cognitive status, about UFOs.

 

Even allowing that some government purposes require lying, the natural course of AI adoption ought to improve matters. Sadly, our current class of disinformation-addicted bureaucrats and politicians can also use AI to make things worse. Here it may be useful to witness the still-lacking progress in domestic drone defense. It's not too soon for Americans to start thinking about how to elect a president who can talk sanely and confidently about how we're going to survive this future.” [1]

 

1. Government Isn't Doing Better on AI Than on UFOs. Jenkins, Holman W; Jr.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 27 June 2026: A13.