Qualitative Ethics and the AI War Machine

Abstract

Using the dispute between the U.S. Department of Defense and Anthropic, alongside backlash against OpenAI, I trace the militarized lineages of frontier AI labs and their relevance for qualitative ethics. Public discourse cast these disputes as moral contests between responsible and irresponsible firms, inviting qualitative researchers to express ethics through vendor choice. I argue that this framing functions as machinewashing, personalizing accountability while obscuring the defense, cloud, and procurement infrastructures through which universities, publishers, and researchers are already entangled. Read through necropolitics, the dispute reveals how AI policies construct a protected human subject, the “American,” while leaving others exposed to violence. Current debates over whether and how to use AI do not reach this infrastructural scale. Drawing on the implicated subject, I ask what responsibility requires when inquiry depends on infrastructures shaped by war.