Pentagons' Biggest Fears:
KilIer AI Swarms, Civil War, Bioweapons (Zombie Apocalypse)...
Original reporting by Politico Pro
Swarms of Killer Robots’: Why AI is Terrifying the American Military
A Q&A with a former Pentagon insider on the AI debates that could shape the future of national security.
| 10/05/2025 06:00 PM EDT
The OpenAI logo appears on a mobile phone.AP Photo/Michael Dwyer
Artificial intelligence technology is poised to transform national security. In the United States, experts and policymakers are already experimenting with large language models that can aid in strategic decision-making in conflicts and autonomous weapons systems (or, as they are more commonly called, “killer robots”) that can make real-time decisions about what to target and whether to use lethal force.
But these new technologies also pose enormous risks. The Pentagon is filled with some of the country’s most sensitive information. Putting that information in the hands of AI tools makes it more vulnerable, both to foreign hackers and to malicious inside actors who want to leak information, as AI can comb through and summarize massive amounts of information better than any human. A misaligned AI agent can also quickly lead to decision-making that unnecessarily escalates conflict.
“These are really powerful tools. There are a lot of questions, I think, about the security of the models themselves,” Mieke Eoyang, the deputy assistant secretary of Defense for cyber policy during the Joe Biden administration, told POLITICO Magazine in a wide-ranging interview about these concerns.
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