[ExI] ‘Swarms of Killer Robots’: Why AI is Terrifying the American Military

[BillK]

‘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.
By Calder McHugh     10/06/2025

<https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/10/06/ai-pentagon-threats-leaks-killer-robots-ai-psychosis-00593922>
Quotes:
There are a lot of guardrails built into the large language models
that are used by the public that are useful for the public, but not
for the military. For instance, you don’t want your average civilian
user of AI tools trying to plan how to kill lots of people, but it’s
explicitly in the Pentagon’s mission to think about and be prepared to
deliver lethality. So, there are things like that that may not be
consistent between the use of a civilian AI model and the military AI
model.

There are also concerns with the “swarms of killer robots” people are
worried about, which involve escalation management. How do you ensure
that you’re not engaging in overkill? How do you ensure that the AI is
responding in the way that you want? And those are other challenges
that the military is going to have to worry about and get their AI to
help them think through.

On that last point, we published a piece in POLITICO Magazine recently
from Michael Hirsh in which he reported that almost all public AI
models preferred aggressive escalation toward a nuclear war when
presented with real-life scenarios. They didn’t seem to understand
de-escalation.

I think one of the challenges that you have with AI models, especially
those that are trained on the past opus of humans, is that the
tendency toward escalation is a human cognitive bias already. It
already happens without AI. So what you’re enabling with AI is for
that to come through faster. And unless you’re engineering in some way
to say, “Hey, check your cognitive biases,” it will give you that
response.
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So, their AI systems are even more keen than USA, NATO and Russia on
starting a nuclear war? Maybe the tech billionaires are correct to be
building their nuclear-proof bunkers.

BillK