AI Arms Race Watch Thread

[Yuli Ban]

Here's another dedicated thread that makes the dedicated mega-threads seem redundant on this new forum software.
The long-awaited AI arms race, talked about extensively in the 2010s!

Artificial intelligence arms race

A military artificial intelligence arms race is a competition or arms race between two or more states to have their military forces equipped with the best artificial intelligence (AI). Since the mid-2010s many analysts have noted the emergence of such a global arms race, the AI Arms Race, between great powers for better military AI, coinciding with and being driven by the increasing geopolitical and military tensions of the Second Cold War

A BAE Systems Corax lethal autonomous weapon

The Pentagon Just Launched a New AI Initiative to Transform Global Warfare
In other words, the AI arms race is finally here

Imagine a nuclear arms race with few-to-no casualties and almost no threat of human extinction. Now replace nukes with unconscionable volumes of real-time data. Welcome to the future of global warfare.

The Pentagon just launched a new artificial intelligence (AI) initiative designed to enhance the curation process of massive amounts of tactical data, according to an announcement from Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, in an initial report from National Defense.

In other words, the AI arms race is finally here.

AI will streamline the Pentagon's global command infrastructures
The new campaign, which is called the DoD AI and Data Acceleration initiative (ADA), is designed to move novel data and AI-linked concepts like joint all-domain command and control, also called JAD2, said Hicks in the report. "The ADA initiative will generate foundational capabilities through a series of implementation experiments or exercises, each one purposely building understanding through successive and incremental learning," she explained during the AI Symposium.

This feeds in well into the Sino-American Cold War thread

[Yuli Ban]

Germany warns: AI arms race already underway

The world is entering a new era of warfare, with artificial intelligence taking center stage. AI is making militaries faster, smarter and more efficient. But if left unchecked, it threatens to destabilize the world.

'Loitering munitions' with a high degree of autonomy are already seeing action in conflict

[Yuli Ban]

And now we get an unexpected incursion from the world of VR of all places. Palmer Luckey, the father of modern VR, is now going full Robo-Cop

[caltrek]

The Pentagon Is Experimenting With Using Artificial Intelligence To "See Days In Advance"
by Brett Tingley
July 30, 2021

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/4 ... in-advance

Introduction:

[(The Drive) U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) recently conducted a series of tests known as the Global Information Dominance Experiments, or GIDE, which combined global sensor networks, artificial intelligence (AI) systems, and cloud computing resources in an attempt to "achieve information dominance" and "decision-making superiority." According to NORTHCOM leadership, the AI and machine learning tools tested in the experiments could someday offer the Pentagon a robust “ability to see days in advance," meaning it could predict the future with some reliability based on evaluating patterns, anomalies, and trends in massive data sets. While the concept sounds like something out of Minority Report, the commander of NORTHCOM says this capability is already enabled by tools readily available to the Pentagon.

General Glen VanHerck, Commander of NORTHCOM and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), told reporters at the Pentagon this week that this was the third test of GIDE, conducted in conjunction with all 11 combatant commands “collaborating in the same information space using the same exact capabilities.” The experiment largely centered around contested logistics and information advantage, two cornerstones of the new warfighting paradigm recently proposed by the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A full transcript of VanHerck's press briefing is available online.

VanHerck told reporters that this AI-enabled decision making could actually allow for a type of proactive forecasting that sounds truly like the stuff of science fiction:

• The machine learning and the artificial intelligence can detect changes [and] we can set parameters where it will trip an alert to give you the awareness to go take another sensor such as GEOINT on-satellite capability to take a closer look at what might be ongoing in a specific location.

caltrek's comment: What I find disturbing about this touched is upon in articles cited earlier. That is to say, it seems like it is becoming increasingly a matter of a highly complicated chess being played between incredibly sophisticated AI dominated systems. I can't see how humans can keep up, or even fully appreciate their own loss of control.

I remember discussions of the Cuban missile crisis. Years later, elites on both sides compared notes. It was like "if you had done that other thing you were thinking of, we would have done this...and that would have resulted in a full scale nuclear war." In a sense, the mutually escalating steps could be seen as being "logical" - yet the end result could have been catastrophic. Something needs to be hard wired into the loop that has as the biggest goal avoiding conflict and escalation.

Of course the problem with the approach I advocate is that the hard liners may dismiss it as "pacifist" and "unrealistic" - as if mutual annihilation were somehow more "logical'.

[caltrek]

AI is About to Radically Alter Military Command Structures that Haven’t Changed Much Since Napoleon’s Army
By Benjamin Jensen
August 18, 2025

Introduction:

(The Conversation) Despite two centuries of evolution, the structure of a modern military staff would be recognizable to Napoleon. At the same time, military organizations have struggled to incorporate new technologies as they adapt to new domains – air, space and information – in modern war.

Additional Extract:

The role of AI agents
Military planners now see a world in which AI agents – autonomous, goal-oriented software that can perceive, decide and act on their own initiative – are mature enough to deploy in command systems. These agents promise to automate the fusion of multiple sources of intelligence, threat-modeling, and even limited decision cycles in support of a commander’s goals. There is still a human in the loop, but the humans will be able to issue commands faster and receive more timely and contextual updates from the battlefield.

These AI agents can parse doctrinal manuals, draft operational plans and generate courses of action, which helps accelerate the tempo of military operations. Experiments – including efforts I ran at Marine Corps University – have demonstrated how even basic large language models can accelerate staff estimates and inject creative, data-driven options into the planning process. These efforts point to the end of traditional staff roles.

There will still be people – war is a human endeavor – and ethics will still factor into streams of algorithms making decisions. But the people who remain deployed are likely to gain the ability to navigate mass volumes of information with the help of AI agents.

These teams are likely to be smaller than modern staffs. AI agents will allow teams to manage multiple planning groups simultaneously.

Read more here: https://theconversation.com/ai-is-abou ... my-262200

[Audrearcia]

And now we get an unexpected incursion from the world of VR of all places. Palmer Luckey, the father of modern VR, is now going full Robo-Cop
pacman 30th anniversary

Anyone else feel overwhelmed by the rapid AI advancements? I remember being fascinated but also intimidated. I experimented with image generation in 2022 and was blown away by its potential, but also a bit creeped out by its imperfections.

[weatheriscool]

[weatheriscool]

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

I think a human should give the go but otherwise it is ethical to use a.i over humans. A machine can be blown up and it doesn't matter but killing someones son is fucked if you have these kinds of bots.

[Cyber_Rebel]

The link above is not about robot soldier vs robot soldiers though? I'd cite the issue with this that Anthropic did, in that the AI directed missiles need to be reliably accurate:

Statement from Anthropic on this matter:

Fully autonomous weapons. Partially autonomous weapons, like those used today in Ukraine, are vital to the defense of democracy. Even fully autonomous weapons (those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets) may prove critical for our national defense. But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk. We have offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems, but they have not accepted this offer. In addition, without proper oversight, fully autonomous weapons cannot be relied upon to exercise the critical judgment that our highly trained, professional troops exhibit every day. They need to be deployed with proper guardrails, which don’t exist today.

Source: https://www.anthropic.com/news/statemen ... ent-of-war

So, unless the U.K. is hiding some frontier model that is above what we in the U.S. have seen, though most likely this will be contracted from our developed AI systems, this is still not a win to reduce unintended causalities. Eventually the models may be good enough for this, but at that point countries will have handed over their major defense systems almost entirely.