AI goes to war

0:00Sean Rameswaram: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. Chat. 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.

0:44Sean Rameswaram: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 is Furum, and that's coming up on today's Explained from Vox.

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2:14Sean Rameswaram: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 AIs continue to progress. What's newer are large language models like ChatGPT, AnthropicsClawed, 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. And the people want to know how Claude or ChatGPT might be fighting this war. Do we know? War in Iran? That's a great idea. Let me help you with that.

2:57Sean Rameswaram:Well, we don't know yet. You know, we can make some educated guesses based on what the technology could do. AI technology is really great at processing large amounts of information. I literally love processing. The U.S. military has hit over a thousand targets in Iran. As you see very well, they have no navy. It's been knocked out. They have no air force that's been knocked out. They have no air detection that'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.

3:32Sean Rameswaram:Just about everything's been knocked out. Looking at new potential targets, prioritizing those, processing information, and using it to do that at machine speed rather than human speed. Humans so slow. Mwahaha. Cheers. Do we know any more about how the military may have used AI in, say, Venezuela on the attack that brought Nicolas 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 Anthropix AI tools have been integrated into the U.S. military's classified networks. And so they can process classified information, to process intelligence, to help plan operations.

4:18Pete Hegseth: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 Nicolas Maduro.

4:29Sean Rameswaram: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 onto 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.

5:14Sean Rameswaram: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 onto a small drone that would enable that once the human locks onto a target, the drone can then carry out the attack all on its own. And that has been used in a small way. It's 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, you know, being used where drones are completing attacks.

6:03Sean Rameswaram: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 in 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 that information very quickly to develop targeting packages, particularly in the early phases of Israel's operations. Which suggests specific possible targets, possible munitions, warnings.

6:43Pete Hegseth:This system produces targets in Gaza faster than a human can.

6:46Sean Rameswaram:But 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 that 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 a 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.

7:27Sean Rameswaram:So, you know, no one's unleashing the swarm of killer robots today, but the trajectory is 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 do something weird that doesn't work, they can update the algorithm. We don't know where future wars are going to be fought. It's an adversarial environment. We don't know what the enemy is going to do.

7:59Sean Rameswaram:I mean, the U.S. military is finding this out right now in its operations against Iran. They're retaliating against U.S. 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 that unpredictability. AI is not so great and sometimes does some strange things. Because you drew a parallel to self-driving cars, you know, we've made an episode about self-driving cars before in which, you know, I think our guest said something like, well, if you're worried about self-driving cars, you know what you should really be worried about is humans.

8:37Sean Rameswaram:Thinking 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 a 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 debate surrounding this technology. Because 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.

9:27Sean Rameswaram: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 U.S. 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.

10:19Sean Rameswaram:And so Air Force has dropped just massive amounts of ordnance 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 Scientist that was rather alarming. The headline was, AIs Can't Stop Recommending Nuclear Strikes in War Game Simulations. I don't know if you saw that one.

11:00Sean Rameswaram:They wrote about a study in which OpenAI, Anthropic, 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. So, like, I think happily, as near as I can 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 sycophancy. They tend to simply just agree with everything that you say.

11:41Sean Rameswaram:And I think anyone that's interacting with some of these models, they can do it to the point of absurdity sometimes where, you know, oh, that's brilliant, the model will tell you. That's a genius thing. War in Iran. That's a great idea. Let me help you with that. You know, and 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 hope not. But his people might be telling him that. So you started this ultimate yes-men phenomenon with these tools where it's not just that they're prone to hallucinations, which is sort of a fancy way of saying they just make things up sometimes.

12:24Sean Rameswaram:But also the models could really be used in ways that either reinforce existing human biases, that reinforce biases in the data, or that people just trust them, that there's sort of this veneer of, oh, the AI said this, so it must be the right thing to do. And people put faith in it. And, you know, we really shouldn't. We should be more skeptical.

12:51Sean Rameswaram: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. That drama is forthcoming on Today Explained.

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17:32Sean Rameswaram:Hey, everybody. Estet Herndon here. I wanted to let you know that Vox Media is returning to South by Southwest in Austin for live tapings of your favorite podcast. Join us from March 13th through March 15th for live tapings of Pivot, Teffy Talks, Professor G's Markets, Where Should We Begin with Esther Perel, and the special live taping of Today Explained, hosted by yours truly. The Vox Media Podcast stage will also feature sessions from Brene Brown and Adam Grant, Marcus Brownlee, Keith Lee, Vivian Tu, Robin Arzon, and more. Visit voxmedia.com slash southbysouthwest to pre-register. and get a special discount on your South by Southwest innovation badge.

18:15Sean Rameswaram:That's voxmedia.com slash south by Southwest. Hope to see you there.

18:29Sean Rameswaram:This is Today Explained. Pete Hegseth, our Secretary of Defense, and Claude Anthropics' large language model, got in a big fight last week. We asked Axios Tech policy reporter Maria Curie what happened.

18:46Pete Hegseth:So this actually goes back to before the Pentagon-related dispute. You know, you have the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amidai, really positioning himself as the safety-first CEO.

18:59Sean Rameswaram: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.

19:17Pete Hegseth: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 standard of all lawful purposes.

19:58Pete Hegseth: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.

20:14Sean Rameswaram: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.

20:30Pete Hegseth:That was not taken well by the Pentagon. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is demanding that San Francisco-based Anthropic drop a number of safeguards or risk losing its$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,

20:52Sean Rameswaram:our nation requires that our partners be willing to help our warfighters win in any fight.