The US military reportedly prepared to intercept a Chinese vessel in the Middle East this spring after an AI chatbot misidentified materials on board, a close call that “almost started a war,” a source told CNN.
Analysts have warned that slipshod AI integration into defense systems could produce catastrophic miscalculations.
A related fear, laid bare in recent Stanford University war games, is “an increasingly automated battlefield” that rapidly increases the pace of warfare, escalating conflicts faster than human commanders intend.
Most militaries require a human in the decision chain, but “the computer is spitting out a list of 1,000 targets. And you’re not moving fast enough,” a US drone warfare veteran told the Financial Times. “The human becomes the bottleneck.”