El Hilo · My Cultura and iHeartPodcasts

La tecnología de la opresión: el uso de la IA como arma de guerra

March 27, 2026·47 min·4 clips
Anthropic, the world's most advanced AI company, refused to let the US government use its model for autonomous lethal weapons.
Artificial intelligence comes in through military smoke. The cold open starts with Anthropic's executive director saying the U.S. government should not use its model for autonomous lethal weapons or mass surveillance. Then the frame gets wider. A fight between a company and the Pentagon sits next to a war where AI is already being used to watch and destroy. Latin America is not treated as background. The host brings up a U.S. military operation in Venezuela, described by Donald Trump as perfect because there was no U.S. base, where more than 80 people died. The calculation sounds cold. Venezuelan soldiers, Cuban agents, and civilians become numbers inside a Pentagon logic that does not seem to value all lives the same way. The border brings the fear closer. After a promo-glitched return, the conversation moves to Palantir, the Anthropic model, and facial recognition systems used around factories or cheaper apartment buildings. The method is plain and rough. People leave places marked as likely immigrant spaces, someone holds a phone to their faces, and a facial recognition system checks whether they appear on lists. The harm is spelled out. Systems described as hunting immigrants also catch American citizens, like dolphins caught in large fishing nets. The consequences are already visible. ICE deported two American citizen girls, and a judge ordered their immediate return. The episode does not frame that as a small bug. It treats it as part of a larger boomerang effect, where tools tested through rights violations abroad come back to violate rights at home. War, surveillance, immigration enforcement, and colonial memory become one machine.

As heard by us

A forceful El Hilo episode on AI as a weapon, a surveillance tool, and an immigration dragnet.

El Hilo makes a stark case that artificial intelligence is already part of war, surveillance, and immigration enforcement, not some future policy dilemma. It opens with the clash over whether the Pentagon should be allowed to use an Anthropic model, then widens the lens to U.S.

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