AI goes to war

This is what President Trump had to say about why the United States is at war with Iran.

We sought repeatedly to make a deal.

We tried.

They wanted to do it.

They didn't want to do it.

Again, they wanted to do it.

They didn't want to do it.

They didn't know what was happening.

Not the best explanation for a war of choice, sir.

I'm personally a do my own research kind of guy, but let's ask AI why we're at war with

Iran.

The United States attacked Iran in 2026 because it claimed Iran posed an imminent threat,

particularly due to Iran's advancing nuclear program and missile capabilities, and aimed

to reduce Iran's ability to project power in the region.

Wow, that was a better explanation.

Thanks, chat.

Fitting that AI was more clear than the president of the United States because it turns out the

United States is using AI to fight the war in Iran.

The future of war is AI, and that future is now here.

I'm Sean, back as firm, and that's coming up on today's explain from Vox.

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Paul Shari knows a lot about AI and how our military is using it.

He's the author of four battlegrounds, Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

We've seen a trajectory of the military adopting AI tools over the last decade, as AI has

continued to progress.

What's newer are large language models, like chat GPT and Tropics Claw, that it's been

reported the military is using in operations in Iran, and so that's a pretty significant

development that we're seeing.

The people want to know how Clawed or chat GPT might be fighting this war, do we know?

War in Iran?

That's a great idea.

Let me help you with that.

Well, we don't know yet.

We can make some educated guesses based on what the technology could do.

AI technology's really great at processing large amounts of information.

I literally love processing.

The US military's hit over 1,000 targets in Iran.

As you see very well, they have no Navy, it's been knocked out.

They have no Air Force, it's been knocked out.

They have no Air Detection, it's been knocked out, their radar has been knocked out.

They need to then find ways to process information about those targets.

So satellite imagery, for example, of the targets they've hit, it's about everything's

been knocked out.

Looking at new potential targets, prioritizing those, processing information, and using

air to do that at machine speed, rather than human speed.

Human so slow, mo-ha-ha, cheers.

Do we know any more about how the military may have used AI in, say, Venezuela on the attack

that brought Nicholas Maduro to Brooklyn of all places?

Because we've recently found out that AI was used there too.

So what we do know is that Anthropics AI tools have been integrated into the US military's

classified networks.

And so they can process classified information, the process intelligence to help plan operations.

From writing emails to raiding enemy capital cities, the Wall Street Journal reports that

the Pentagon used Anthropics AI model Claude as part of its operation to capture Venezuelan

President Nicholas Maduro.

There's no suggestion that Claude was actually firing any of the missiles or manning any

of the machine guns.

Yeah, we've had this sort of tantalizing details, okay, that these tools were used in

the Maduro raid.

We don't know exactly how.

So we've seen AI technology in a broad sense using other conflicts as well in Ukraine,

in Israel's operations in Gaza to do a couple different things.

One of the ways that AI is being used in Ukraine in a different kind of context is putting

autonomy on to drones themselves.

The drone now flies on autopilot mode using our software.

We assigned it with a mission and it built its own flying route, giving the munition instructions

on where it needs to go and what it needs to look for.

And so when I was in Ukraine, one of the things that I saw Ukrainian drone operators and engineers

demonstrate is a little box like the size of a pack of cigarettes that you could put

on to a small drone that would enable that once the human locks on to a target, the drone

can then carry out the attack all on its own.

And that has been used in a small, small ways, not necessarily widespread use in Ukraine

today.

So we're seeing AI begin to creep into all of these aspects of military operations in intelligence,

in planning, in logistics, but also right at the edge in terms of being used where drones

are completing attacks.

Okay, so we know a little bit more about how this technology was used in Ukraine.

How about with Israel and Gaza?

So there's been some reporting about how the Israel Defense Forces have used AI and Gaza

and certainly large language models, but machine learning systems that can synthesize

and fuse large amounts of information, geolocation data, cell phone data, and connection,

social media data to bring this together, process all of the information very quickly

to develop targeting packages, particularly in the early phases of Israel's operations.

Which suggests specific possible targets, possible immune nations, warnings.

This system produces targets in Gaza faster than a human can.

So it raises thorny questions about human involvement in these decisions.

And one of the criticisms that had come up was that humans were still approving these

targets, but that the volume of strikes and the amount of information they needed to be

processed was such that maybe human oversight, in some cases was a little bit more of a rubber

stamp.

The question is where does this go?

And are we headed in trajectory where over time, humans get pushed out of the loop and

we see down the road fully autonomous weapons that are making their own decisions about

whom to kill on the battlefield?

That's the direction things are headed.

So no one's unleashing the swarm of killer robots today, but the trajectories in that direction.

And maybe I'll make a comparison here to self-driving cars where car companies can map the environment

down to the centimeter.

They know the height of the curbs.

They know where the stoplights are.

They can test self-driving cars in the actual environment they're going to be in.

And when they're doing something weird that doesn't work, they can update the algorithm.

We don't know where future words are going to be fought.

It's an adversarial environment.

We don't know what the enemy's going to do.

I mean, the US military is finding this out right now in its operations against Iran.

They're retaliating against US bases against Gulf states against Israel using drones and

missiles.

And now we're in a phase in the Iran conflict where things become super unpredictable.

People do an okay job of adapting their unpredictability.

AI is not so great and sometimes does some strange things.

Because you drew a parallel to self-driving cars, we've made an episode about self-driving

cars before in which I think our guests said something like, well, if you're worried about

self-driving cars, you know what you should really be worried about is humans.

Speaking about Iran, we saw reports that a school was bombed in Iran where maybe 160

were killed.

A lot of them young girls, children, presumably that was a mistake made by human.

Do we think that autonomous weapons will be capable of making that same mistake or will

they be better at war than we are?

This question of will autonomous weapons be better than humans or not is like one of

the core issues of the debates surrounding the technology because the proponents of autonomous

weapons will say, look, people make mistakes all the time.

And machines might be able to do better.

Part of that depends on how much the militaries that are using this technology are trying really

hard to avoid mistakes.

If militaries don't care about civilian casualties, then AI can allow militaries to simply

strike targets faster, in some cases even commit atrocities faster.

If that's what militaries are trying to do, I think there is this really important potential

here to use the technology to be more precise.

And if you look at the long arc of precision-guided weapons, let's say over the last century

or so, it's pointed towards much more precision and warfare.

So if you look at the example of the US strikes in Iran right now, it's worth contrasting

this with the widespread aerial bombing campaigns against cities that we saw in World War

II for example.

Where whole cities were devastated in Europe and Asia because the bombs just weren't precise

at all.

And so air forces dropped just massive amounts of ordinance to try to hit even a single

factory.

The possibility here is that AI could make it better over time to allow militaries to

hit military targets and avoid civilian casualties.

Now if the data is wrong and they've got the wrong target on the list, they're going

to hit the wrong thing very precisely and AI is not necessarily going to fix that.

On the other hand, I saw a piece of reporting in new scientists that was rather alarming.

The headline was, AI's can't stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations.

I don't know if you saw that one.

They wrote about a study in which open AI andthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated

war games in 95% of cases, which I think is slightly more than we humans typically resort

to nuclear weapons.

Should that be freaking us out?

It's a little concerning.

It's a little concerning.

Like I think happily, it's nearly like a tell.

No one is connecting large language models to decisions about using nuclear weapons.

But I think it points to some of the strange failure modes of AI systems.

So they tend towards sycophantcy.

They tend to simply just agree with everything that you say.

I don't think anyone that's interacting with some of these models, they could do it to

the point of absurdity sometimes where, you know, oh, that's brilliant in the model.

That's a genius thing.

War in Iran.

That's a great idea.

Let me help you.

You know, you're like, I don't think so, and that's a real problem when you're talking

about intelligence analysis.

Do we think like GPT is telling Pete Hegseth that right now?

I mean, I don't know.

I hope not.

But you know, but his people might be telling him that, you know, so, so, so like you,

you started this ultimate Yes Men phenomenon with these tools where it's not just that they're

prone to hallucinations or just sort of a fancy way of saying they just make things up sometimes.

But also the models could really be used in ways that either reinforce existing human biases

that reinforce biases in the data or that the people just trust them that they're sort

of this veneer of, oh, the AI said this.

So it must be the right thing to do.

People put faith in it and, you know, we really shouldn't.

We should be more skeptical.

Be more skeptical says Paul Shari.

He's the executive vice president at the center for a new American security.

There are two big stories right now in the world of AI and war.

One is the one we just talked about.

The other is the drama between Claude and Pete.

And drama is forthcoming on today's blend.

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This is today explained.

Pete Hegseth, our Secretary of Defense and Claude and Thropics large language model

gotten a big fight last week. We asked Axios tech policy reporter Maria Curie, what happened?

So this actually goes back to before the Pentagon related dispute, you know,

you have the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amadi really positioning himself as the safety first CEO.

One way to think about Anthropic is that it's a little bit trying to put bumpers or guardrails

on that experiment, right? Because if we don't, then you could end up in the world of like the

cigarette companies or the opioid companies where they knew there were dangers and they didn't

talk about them and certainly did not prevent them. And he has been very vocal. He's posted on

X and talked a lot about how he does think there has to be a federal standard to regulate artificial

intelligence and that kind of put him at odds with David Sachs, the guy that's running AI for

President Trump in the White House. They've gotten into, you know, Twitter spats before.

And so it was kind of a long time coming before this Pentagon thing blew up.

This is essentially a situation where the Pentagon for a while has been trying to negotiate terms

with all of the AI labs to bring them into their classified systems.

Under this, the standard of all lawful purposes and Anthropic had kind of said, you know,

there are two specific scenarios in which we are not comfortable with the all lawful purposes

standard. The first one is this issue of domestic mass surveillance and the second one is autonomous

weapons. It doesn't show the judgment that a human soldier would show. Friendly fire or shooting a

civilian or just the wrong kind of things. We don't want to sell something that we don't think is

reliable and we don't want to sell something that could get our own people killed or that could

get innocent people killed. That was not taken while by the Pentagon. Defense Secretary Pete Hexeth

is demanding that San Francisco based Anthropic drop a number of safeguards or risk losing it's

$200 million contract. We do have a statement from the Pentagon and they're telling us that they

are currently quote reviewing its relationship with Anthropics saying quote our nation requires

that our partners be willing to help our warfighters win in any fight. We've been talking to senior

officials throughout this reporting process and they really view it as a private company telling

the government how to protect the country and how to do national security and conduct operations

and essentially what we know is that there were phone calls happening between the Pentagon and

Anthropic nailing down final language around this contract when all of a sudden Pete Hexeth tweeted

that he would be designating Anthropic a supply chain risk. Effective immediately no contractor

supplier or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial

activity with Anthropic. President Trump posted on Truth Social.

Truth Social. The left wing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a disastrous mistake trying to

strong arm the Department of War and force them to obey their terms of service instead of our

constitution. Their selfishness is putting American lives at risk. Our troops in danger and our

national security in jeopardy. And the entire federal government was going to have to get rid of

Anthropic. Essentially Anthropic had been asking for commercially acquired information and data

for there to be a prohibition on that collection in the Pentagon contract and this goes to the

concern around domestic mass surveillance. The idea here is that according to Anthropic the law

has not caught up to artificial intelligence and you could have a situation where it's perfectly

legal for the Pentagon to collect commercially acquired information that could include you know

financial information purchased from data brokers web browsing data beyond that voter registration

rolls social media posts whether or not you attended a protest concealed carry permits.

There's all sorts of data out there that the government can collect in a perfectly legal way

and you could see how artificial intelligence could make it much quicker much more efficient

to have a continuous collection of that data to really pinpoint and target individuals.

That was a concern and so they were asking for this specific language and they thought they were

about to get it when all of a sudden Pete Hegseth posted on X. Why did they think they were going to

get it? Well you know they thought that this was going to be the language that commercially

acquired information coupled with the all awful purposes. They thought that that was just going

to be enough but the Pentagon actually came back and said no that's not something that we are

comfortable doing which begs the question how did this open AI deal then past muster?

Oh that's a spoiler because what happens is the Pentagon drops and thropic on Friday evening

and then within what like minutes they pick up open AI? That's right so they pick up open AI

for a contract that was very quickly like you know everybody was poking holes in it on X.

I don't see this as a meaningful improvement to the contract there still seem to be some

big shortcomings slash loop holes. I agree it's better but I think the government can drive a

truck through the intentionality language and we heard from you know people familiar with the

negotiations too like this isn't going to actually prevent domestic mass surveillance from happening

it's still too risky so you had Sam Altman on X trying to field all of this criticism he you know

he didn't ask me anything on Saturday night where he had thousands and thousands of questions of

people trying to get answers on how did you go from a tool for the betterment of the human race to

let's work with the department of war if the government comes back with a memo saying that in their

view mass domestic surveillance is legal do you do that? were the terms that you accepted the same

ones anthropic rejected? And so you fast forward to Monday and you have Sam Altman saying okay we've

gone back to the drawing board. We shouldn't have rushed to get this out on Friday we were genuinely

trying to de-escalate things and avoid a much worse outcome but I think it just looked opportunistic

and sloppy. We need to essentially add some language to this contract to give people more

assurances that we are not going to conduct domestic mass surveillance and what they added was

that commercially acquired information cannot be collected and that is prohibited which is the

exact words that anthropic was looking to have in their contract. So like so many other things with

this administration this ends up feeling rather confusing and inconsistent because they bail and

anthropic because anthropic has these ideals these standards they bounce to open AI but open AI is

trying to work out a deal with the same exact standards basically. Well now that we have the specific

language and the legalese it's looking like it's the exact same standards. You know we've also heard

from the Pentagon from Pentagon officials saying like we were able to do this with Sam Altman

he's reasonable this was a reasonable negotiation and anthropic has personal vendettas and so to

your point about inconsistencies absolutely personalities are a factor here and it's not all just

going to come down to legalese and these two standards. Did the Pentagon just go exclusive with

open AI and Sam Altman because there's been reporting that anthropic was actually used in these

attacks on Iran that followed this drama that we had last Friday. Yeah so anthropic is the longest

standing AI model that is being used in the Pentagon for classified purposes. We've established that

it was used in the Madoodle raid. We've established that it was used in the Iran raid. They're very

useful to the Pentagon. Do you know you have senior defense officials describing how much of a

pain in the ass it would be to actually get rid of anthropic and to reportedly they didn't.

No they haven't yet. They were given this six month off ramp for anthropic to be phased out

and for another AI lab to be phased in. I think right now people are having these questions of was

this all just Sam Altman trying to elbow out his competitor from the Pentagon. I think it's too soon to

tell. So I think what this tells us is that in the absence of a law that actually contemplates

artificial intelligence we are left as a broader country and society relying on either

Pete Hegg's that's Department of War deciding how this technology is going to be used

or anyone individual company and anthropic at the end of the day is a company.

And so you have all of these different parties also saying all these companies also saying we

actually do think that a law should be passed we would love for Congress to actually just set the

rules of the road because we have our own competitive pressures that we're also dealing with.

Now whether or not Congress is going to pass a law around this I don't know they've been a

sleep at the wheel on almost everything. So Congress has been asleep at the wheel on almost

everything says Maria Curie from Axios.com Peter Balanon Rosen and Heidi Mawagdi produced our

show today Jolie Myers edited Patrick Boyd and David Tatashore mixed Andrea Lopez Crusado was

on the fact check I'm Sean Rommesforum back at today explained.

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