On June 10, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published "Policy on the AI Exponential,” a sweeping set of technology policy recommendations. His proposals include closing the data broker loophole, a powerful tool for domestic mass surveillance. That same week, a federal spy power expired. Title VII of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) expired on June 12, 2026, after the House rejected a short-term extension 198–218 the previous day. Democrats have refused to reauthorize the spy powers until President Trump replaces Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte. Then last week, Republican leadership aimed to get a reauthorization back on track with a confirmation hearing for Jay Clayton to be Director of National Intelligence. Trump delayed that hearing, scrambling the timeline for FISA Title VII renewal. This hands reformers leverage: FISA reauthorization is considered must-pass, which is exactly when long-stalled reforms become attachable. Between that and a prominent tech CEO spotlighting the data broker loophole, these are favorable conditions for anyone who wants to rein in government surveillance. Reformers should press the advantage.
The consequences of the FISA Title VII “expiration” are narrower than the rhetoric around it suggests. Under Section 702, the most debated portion of Title VII, data collection does not switch on and off with the statute. It operates through annual certifications approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which authorizes surveillance of specific categories of foreign intelligence targets and compels communications providers—phone carriers, email platforms, and the like—to turn over relevant data. The current certifications were approved in March 2026 and run through approximately March 2027. The law's transition provision explicitly states that certifications in effect at the time of sunset remain valid until they expire. What the government cannot do during a lapse is issue new directives to providers or add new targets. That said, it is unlikely that Congress will let the statute lapse for long. Prediction markets expect them to reauthorize the spy powers by the end of July. Rather than fear catastrophe resulting from the “expiration” of Section 702, lawmakers should view this as an opportune moment for reforms to Section 702, such as requiring a warrant to search for information on Americans whose communications get “incidentally” swept up in the FISA database.
The data broker loophole is a distinct surveillance mechanism from Section 702. As Amodei notes in his essay, current law allows the government to purchase data that Americans have shared with private companies. No warrant, no court order, just a procurement contract. This includes cell phone location data you share with your weather app as well as your internet browsing history. Whereas Section 702 is a foreign intelligence authority with statutory constraints and FISC oversight, the commercial data market operates outside that framework entirely and is used for ordinary domestic law enforcement. According to documentation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agencies that have purchased commercial location data include the IRS, Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the FBI—without a warrant.
It’s not just federal law enforcement that purchases Americans’ data in the absence of a warrant. A California county used purchased location data to track how many people attended church services, with enough precision to identify who visited which individual structures on a church's property. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention paid $420,000 for location data harvested from tens of millions of phones to monitor curfew compliance and track visits to K-12 schools. The Federal Trade Commission found that one of the leading government-facing brokers was collecting more than 17 billion location signals from roughly a billion smartphones per data; data the agency found was not anonymized and could easily identify individuals. Another data broker has sold data that tracks individual Americans visiting labor union offices, medical facilities, and military sites.
As Amodei points out, the data broker loophole “predates AI, but AI will raise the stakes considerably by making mass analysis of such data far more revealing and useful.” The House passed legislation to close this loophole with bipartisan support in 2024. The Senate never voted on it. As AI raises the stakes, Congress should finish the job.
