Military Domains

"Perhaps the most obvious and worrying instances of AI conflict are those in which human conflict is already a major concern, such as military domains (although other, less salient forms of conflict such as international trade wars are also cause for concern). For example, beyond applications of more narrow AI tools in lethal autonomous weapons systems (Horowitz, 2021), future AI systems might serve as advisors or negotiators in high-stakes military decisions (Black et al., 2024; Manson, 2024). Indeed, companies such as Palantir have already developed LLM-powered tools for military planning (Palantir, 2025), and the US Department of Defence has recently been evaluating models for such capacities, with personnel revealing that they “could be deployed by the military in the very near term” (Manson, 2023). The use of AI in command and control systems to gather and synthesise information – or recommend and even autonomously make decisions – could lead to rapid unintended escalation if these systems are not robust or are otherwise more conflict-prone (Johnson, 2021a; Johnson, 2020; Laird, 2020, see also Case Study 10).10"