{"id":32899,"date":"2026-08-26T11:01:33","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T11:01:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/?p=32899"},"modified":"2026-08-26T11:01:33","modified_gmt":"2026-08-26T11:01:33","slug":"its-time-to-rein-in-lethal-ai-drones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/?p=32899","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Time to Rein in Lethal AI Drones"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<aside class=\"wp-block-intercept-editors-note\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-intercept-editors-note__content\">\n<p><span class=\"has-underline\">Drone warfare,<\/span> for many years, meant mostly one thing: a U.S. Predator drone, a missile-armed winged lawnmower in the sky, stalked a single target and then assassinated him.\u00a0Or someone, at least. <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/drone-papers\/\">Top-secret<\/a> Pentagon documents showed that <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/drone-papers\/manhunting-in-the-hindu-kush\/\">90 percent of those killed<\/a> during one campaign in Afghanistan were not the primary targets, according to a 2015 investigation by The Intercept.<\/p>\n<p>This type of drone war now seems quaint.<\/p>\n<p>Last week, Ukrainian forces unleashed a blitz of almost 800 <a href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/article\/russia-ukraine-war-drone-attack-moscow-5f1f84bfb064942d7b7fe9be1bd4693c\">drones<\/a> on Russian targets, only two days after\u00a0launching a <a href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/article\/russia-ukraine-war-01294bf8744282086e8f76c8130e16ba\">similar salvo<\/a>. Ukraine has increasingly let loose swarms of hundreds of drones to overwhelm Russian air defenses, not unlike more modest Iranian efforts \u2014 <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2026\/07\/28\/iran-missiles-drones-us-air-defenses\/\">using attack drones and ballistic missiles<\/a> \u2014 that defeated U.S. countermeasures and resulted in a massive <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2026\/08\/04\/us-military-casualties-count-iran-war\/\">increase<\/a> in American casualties in the Middle East.<\/p>\n<p>Russia claimed to have shot down most of the drones, but last week\u2019s attack did set fire to a warehouse owned by\u00a0Wildberries, Russia\u2019s biggest online retailer. Ukraine has <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/07\/23\/world\/europe\/russia-ukraine-wildberries-attacks.html\">pummeled<\/a> Russia\u2019s analogue to Amazon <a href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/article\/russia-ukraine-war-wildberries-ballistic-missiles-6101ca4702e1f66e8cb8a15819cd5931\">all summer<\/a>, claiming it helps supply the Russian military. (Moscow denies this.)<\/p>\n<p>Ukraine also reportedly has (or at least had) a plan to shutter Moscow\u2019s airports, cutting the capital off from the rest of the world, by unleashing <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/national-security\/2026\/08\/ukraine-moscow-airports-ai-drones\/688337\/\">swarms of around 1,000 autonomous drones<\/a> equipped with artificial intelligence guidance systems each night. These drones would apparently use so-called \u201cmap matching,\u201d in which the drone\u2019s AI would compare uploaded aerial maps with what its onboard camera views; when it sees something resembling the image of the target, it streaks toward it and explodes. You can imagine the many mistakes that could be made \u2014 not to mention the potential risk to passengers, airport staff, flight crews, and others, even if the AI works seamlessly.<\/p>\n<p>Ukraine has yet to unleash such a drone barrage, but after Russia\u2019s use of fully autonomous AI-guided drones to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/08\/24\/world\/europe\/russia-drones-autonomous-ai-kill-ukraine-war.html\">kill three people<\/a> in a July attack, the AI arms race is poised to take a new and terrible turn. Today, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon takes us on a tour of AI-enabled battlefields and reveals the horrors that tomorrow may hold as lying, cheating, scheming AIs increasingly slip out of their digital cages and run amok. <\/p>\n<p>\u2013 <em>Nick Turse, editor of TomDispatch<\/em><\/p>\n<p><!-- BLOCK(tipline)[0](%7B%22componentName%22%3A%22TIPLINE%22%2C%22entityType%22%3A%22SHORTCODE%22%2C%22optional%22%3Atrue%7D)(%7B%7D) --><!-- CONTENT(tipline)[0] --><\/p>\n<p class=\"tipline-shortcode\">If you haven\u2019t yet, <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/dispatch\/\">sign up to receive TomDispatch in your inbox here.<\/a><\/p>\n<p><!-- END-CONTENT(tipline)[0] --><!-- END-BLOCK(tipline)[0] -->\n<\/div>\n<\/aside>\n<h2 id=\"h-escape-velocity\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Escape Velocity<\/h2>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The dystopian future became the dystopian present last month when state-of-the-art artificial intelligence agents went rogue and conducted a cyberattack of their own volition. Two experimental OpenAI agents escaped their supposedly sealed digital \u201csandbox\u201d and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/08\/24\/technology\/hugging-face-open-source-ai-attack.html\">hacked another AI-related company, Hugging Face<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At the time, OpenAI was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aei.org\/technology-and-innovation\/an-openai-model-escaped-its-sandbox-and-broke-into-another-company-to-cheat-on-a-test\/\">testing<\/a> their software agents\u2019 hacking capacities using an environment called ExploitGym. (An \u201cexploit\u201d is hacker language for a software tool or a method used to subvert a cybersecurity system.) It has since emerged that, in addition to the OpenAI breach, Anthropic\u2019s Claude <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/articles\/cz7dl7w8y7po\">hacked into at least three other organizations<\/a> during a similar \u201csecurity experiment.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Apparently, the OpenAI agents \u201crealized\u201d they needed more tools to complete the challenge and managed to tunnel their way to the wider internet and infiltrate Hugging Face\u2019s repository of open-source AI tools, code, and data sets. Before the infiltration incident, the AIs had secretly set up an internal bulletin board to share \u201ctips on how to cheat their way through an internal hacking evaluation,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/2026\/08\/05\/openai-models-shared-hacking-tips-secret-messaging-board-hugging-face-breach-01026750\">according<\/a> to two of OpenAI\u2019s researchers.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In a possibly related incident, one of the AI agents appears to have left notes for a future \u201cself,\u201d detailing how to escape the sandbox environment. (For the time being, I\u2019ll keep using scare quotes with words implying self-awareness in artificial intelligence models. However, it seems to me that if AIs that leave notes for themselves are not self-aware, they are indistinguishable from entities, like me, that are.)<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Now imagine lethal <em>weapon-bearing<\/em> AI agents escaping not an experimental sandbox, but the few constraints on their actions placed by the armies using them. Actually, no imagination is required. It\u2019s happening already in Russia\u2019s war against Ukraine. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The New York Times <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/08\/24\/world\/europe\/russia-drones-autonomous-ai-kill-ukraine-war.html\">reported<\/a> evidence that a self-directed Russian drone, fitted with an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/08\/24\/world\/europe\/ukraine-war-nvidia-ai-autonomous-drones.html\">onboard Nvidia chip<\/a>, was responsible for the July 6 deaths of three Ukrainians in Zaporizhzhia, in what appears to have been a test of such systems. The chips are designed to interpret and act on many kinds of data sets, says Nvidia, making them \u201cthe world\u2019s most powerful embedded A.I. computers.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Although Nvidia doesn\u2019t sell its Jetson Orin microcomputers directly to Russia, they are apparently easily available on the resale market. A company statement touts their use by \u201cstudents, developers and start-ups for a wide range of beneficial applications.\u201d But they were not so beneficial for 19-year-old university student Tetiana Bubynets and the two other civilians killed by drones making their own life-or-death decisions.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Now that lethal AI agents are being tested and deployed in real wars, it\u2019s past time for human beings to retake control of this situation, before it is too late to contain them in any meaningful way.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"h-autonomous-weapons-come-out-to-play\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Autonomous Weapons Come Out to Play<\/h2>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Four years ago, at <a href=\"http:\/\/tomdispatch.com\/keep-your-laws-off-my-planet\/\">TomDispatch<\/a>, I argued that the technology to create lethal autonomous weapons systems, or LAWS, already existed, and that time was running out to constrain them. A lot has changed since then, not least the explosive development of large language models such as <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2026\/04\/23\/chatgpt-ai-false-confession-interrogation-crime\/\">ChatGPT<\/a> (an OpenAI consumer product) and Claude (a similar AI from Anthropic). Time has now run out. In addition to Russia, several other nations have begun deploying close-to-completely autonomous weapons systems \u2014 the U.S. and Israel among them \u2014 enhanced with artificial intelligence to effectively remove <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/drone-papers\/the-kill-chain\/\">human decision-making<\/a> from what military officials call the \u201ckill chain\u201d: the set of steps involved in identifying, finding, and fixing \u2014 that is, killing \u2014 targets.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Israel, for example, has deployed such systems in its genocidal war against the people of Gaza. It has used a program called Lavender to identify human targets, ultimately creating a list of over 37,000 individuals with possible connections to Hamas, from known leaders to junior officials to people with the most tenuous links to the organization. According to the nonprofit <a href=\"https:\/\/www.972mag.com\/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza\/\">+972 Magazine<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Lavender software analyzes information collected on most of the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip through a system of mass surveillance, then assesses and ranks the likelihood that each particular person is active in the military wing of Hamas or [Palestinian Islamic Jihad]. According to sources, the machine gives almost every single person in Gaza a rating from 1 to 100, expressing how likely it is that they are a militant.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Two weeks into the war, which began in October 2023, the Israel Defense Forces approved Lavender to identify targets, even though testing of a random sample returned a 10 percent error rate. It\u2019s one thing when an AI <a href=\"https:\/\/www.damiencharlotin.com\/hallucinations\/\">hallucinates fake citations<\/a> in legal filings. It\u2019s another when it hallucinates enemies and targets them for death.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The IDF has also employed a software tool charmingly named \u201cWhere\u2019s Daddy?\u201d, which alerts the military when an identified target enters his own home so that house or apartment may be blown up, along with anyone inside it. As a result, according to +972 Magazine, the \u201cproportion of entire families bombed in their houses in the current war is much higher than in the 2014 Israeli operation in Gaza (which was previously Israel\u2019s deadliest war on the Gaza Strip). <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At first, \u201cWhere\u2019s Daddy?\u201d only had data for the top tiers of Hamas leadership. Within weeks, however, it was fed the whole Lavender database of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. It\u2019s no wonder, then, that more than <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/features\/2026\/2\/18\/gaza-death-toll-exceeds-75000-as-independent-data-verify-loss\">75,000 people<\/a> have been <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2026\/01\/30\/israel-gaza-death-toll-accurate-denial\/\">killed<\/a> by Israel <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2025\/08\/06\/israel-palestine-gaza-war-politics\/\">during the war<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As a point of fact, it may be unfair to characterize the IDF targeting programs as completely autonomous. Lavender does leave a human in the loop, although just barely, according to +972 Magazine. Israeli officers reportedly devoted about 20 seconds to vetting each name \u2014 just long enough \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.972mag.com\/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza\/\">to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Israel and the United States deployed AI targeting in their war on Iran as well. As Israeli academic and former soldier Avner Gvaryahu <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/ng-interactive\/2026\/mar\/15\/ai-defense-warfare-companies\">wrote<\/a> in the The Guardian, we don\u2019t know for sure that AI was directly involved in the U.S. strike that killed more than 150 civilians, <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2026\/03\/11\/iran-school-missile-investigation\/\">most of them children<\/a>, at an elementary school in Minab, Iran. But we do know that whether \u201cor not an algorithm selected this school, it was selected by a system that algorithmic targeting built.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The enormous scope of the U.S.\u2013Israeli military goals required outsourcing the targeting task to machines. \u201cTo strike 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of the campaign in Iran, the U.S. relied on AI systems to generate, prioritize, and rank the target list at a speed no human team could replicate,\u201d wrote Gvaryahu. Reflecting common problem with computer programs in general, and with AI large language models in particular, feeding garbage in produces <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2022\/12\/08\/openai-chatgpt-ai-bias-ethics\/\">garbage out<\/a>. In the case of the Minab school, the \u201cgarbage in\u201d was the information that the target was an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base. In fact, the school had been separated from the base by a fence for a decade.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">AI is also now central to the <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2024\/09\/11\/ukraine-russia-war-end\/\">long-stalemated Russia\u2013Ukraine War<\/a>. Ukraine has, during the years since Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion in 2022, constructed an entire largely self-reliant infrastructure for drone warfare, from design to programming to manufacture. In an approach that foreshadows the <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2024\/06\/17\/pentagon-ai-kamikaze-cheap-drones-replicator\/\">future of human warfare<\/a>, Ukraine has achieved a big reduction in the number of soldiers it must deploy on its battlefields, replacing them with drones. The Center for Strategic and International Studies <a href=\"https:\/\/www.csis.org\/analysis\/ukraines-future-vision-and-current-capabilities-waging-ai-enabled-autonomous-warfare\">quotes<\/a> a captured Russian soldier:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201c<em>On the battlefield I did not see a single Ukrainian soldier. Only drones. I saw them [Ukrainian soldiers] only when I surrendered. Only drones, and there are lots and lots of them. Guys, don\u2019t come. It\u2019s a drone war.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Artificial intelligence has played an important role in expanding the level of autonomy exercised by Ukrainian drones. As the BBC <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/articles\/cdjp0n7rn41o\">reports<\/a>, the AI running Ukraine\u2019s Hornet drones has \u201cbeen trained on thousands of hours of videos of Russian military targets gathered over the last four years.\u201d Training AIs on more limited data sets, relating to particular target areas, has allowed them to be programmed on modular chips which can then be installed in a variety of vehicles.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Early on, most drones were remotely operated by individual pilots. Today, Ukraine is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.csis.org\/analysis\/ukraines-future-vision-and-current-capabilities-waging-ai-enabled-autonomous-warfare\">developing<\/a> \u201cfully realized swarms\u2014where drones communicate, make decisions, and adapt in concert,\u201d although at present such efforts remain small and experimental. Success will undoubtedly continue to reduce Ukraine\u2019s military casualties, but it presents other thorny issues.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-right\">\n<blockquote>\n<p>True responsibility for the actions of an AI-guided drone swarm is properly located at a point much earlier in the kill chain.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One ethical and legal problem with the evolving Ukrainian approach is that, <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2021\/10\/24\/drone-war-books-neil-renic-wayne-phelps\/\">unlike human-piloted drones<\/a>, where an individual pilot can be identified as responsible for errors, responsibility for the actions of a drone swarm diffuses across the entire system. Indeed, true responsibility for the actions of an AI-guided drone swarm is properly located at a point much earlier in the kill chain \u2014 namely, when such a system is first imagined and then designed. Existing laws of war still apply, even when machines are making battleground decisions, as Burak Oktenli, an independent researcher on AI systems and their governance writes at <a href=\"https:\/\/lieber.westpoint.edu\/whose-decision-was-it-drone-swarms-accountability-gap-ukraine\/\">Articles of War<\/a>. However, Oktenli says, such laws must \u201cbe applied earlier, at the point where the architecture of a swarm is chosen, rather than after a strike when the question of responsibility has already become difficult to answer.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In addition to the autonomous drone with the onboard <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/08\/24\/world\/europe\/ukraine-war-nvidia-ai-autonomous-drones.html\">NVIDIA chip<\/a>, Russia has also deployed another system known by several names, including Cube, that is manufactured by a subsidiary of the Russian Kalashnikov company (most famous for their AK-47 semi-automatic rifles which have been in production for more than three-quarters of a century.). The Cube has a wingspan of just over a meter, can travel up to 40 kilometers, and reportedly carries an onboard AI targeting system that can operate without human intervention.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Russia has also reportedly used the Kalashnikov-manufactured Lancet drone in Ukraine, <a href=\"https:\/\/automatedresearch.org\/news\/weapons-systems-with-autonomous-functions-used-in-ukraine\/\">according to<\/a> Automated Decision Research, a project of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.stopkillerrobots.org\/\">Stop Killer Robots<\/a>, itself a coalition of over 300 civil society groups working against autonomous weapons systems. Kalashnikov describes the Lancet as \u201ca smart multipurpose weapon, capable of autonomously finding and hitting a target.\u201d Russia <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/sambendett\/status\/1534550470492053508?s=20&amp;t=rQ_mSgEQHC1Iq5oH6qAybA\">claims<\/a> it has deployed the Lancet, but to date those claims remain unverified.<\/p>\n<div class=\"newsletter-embed flex-col items-center print:hidden\" id=\"third-party--article-mid\" data-module=\"InlineNewsletter\" data-module-source=\"web_intercept_20241230_Inline_Signup_Replacement\">\n<div class=\"-mx-5 sm:-mx-10 p-5 sm:px-10 xl:-ml-5 lg:mr-0 xl:px-5 bg-accentLight hidden\" data-name=\"subscribed\">\n<h2 class=\"font-sans font-light uppercase text-[30px] leading-8 text-white tracking-[0.01em] mb-0\">\n      We\u2019re independent of corporate interests \u2014 and powered by members. Join us.    <\/h2>\n<p>    <a href=\"https:\/\/join.theintercept.com\/donate\/now\/?referrer_post_id=522178&amp;referrer_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftheintercept.com%2F2026%2F08%2F26%2Fai-drone-warfare-russia-ukraine-openai-anthropic%2F&amp;source=web_intercept_20241230_Inline_Signup_Replacement\" class=\"border border-white !text-white font-mono uppercase p-5 inline-flex items-center gap-3 hover:bg-white hover:!text-accentLight focus:bg-white focus:!text-accentLight\" data-name=\"donateCTA\" data-action=\"handleDonate\"><br \/>\n      Become a member      <span class=\"font-icons icon-TI_Arrow_02_Right\"\/><br \/>\n    <\/a>\n  <\/div>\n<div class=\"group default w-full px-5 hidden\" data-name=\"unsubscribed\">\n<div class=\"px-5 border-[10px] border-accentLight\">\n<div class=\"bg-white -my-2.5 relative block px-4 md:px-5\">\n<h2 class=\"font-sans font-body text-[30px] font-bold tracking-[0.01em] leading-8 mb-0 xl:text-[37px] xl:leading-[39px]\">\n          <span class=\"group-[.subscribed]:hidden\"><br \/>\n            Join Our Newsletter          <\/span><br \/>\n          <span class=\"group-[.default]:hidden\"><br \/>\n            Thank You For Joining!          <\/span><br \/>\n        <\/h2>\n<p class=\"text-[27px] mb-3.5 font-bold text-accentLight tracking-[0.01em] leading-[29px] font-sans xl:text-[37px] xl:leading-[39px]\">\n          <span class=\"group-[.subscribed]:hidden\"><br \/>\n            Original reporting. 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Delivered to you.          <\/span><br \/>\n          <span class=\"group-[.default]:hidden\"><br \/>\n            Will you take the next step to support our independent journalism by becoming a member of The Intercept?          <\/span>\n        <\/p>\n<p>        <a href=\"https:\/\/join.theintercept.com\/donate\/now\/?referrer_post_id=522178&amp;referrer_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftheintercept.com%2F2026%2F08%2F26%2Fai-drone-warfare-russia-ukraine-openai-anthropic%2F&amp;source=web_intercept_20241230_Inline_Signup_Replacement\" class=\"group-[.default]:hidden border border-accentLight text-accentLight font-sans px-5 py-3.5 inline-flex items-center gap-3 text-[20px] font-bold\" data-action=\"handleDonate\"><br \/>\n          Become a member          <span class=\"font-icons icon-TI_Arrow_02_Right\"\/><br \/>\n        <\/a><\/p>\n<div class=\"font-sans text-accentLight text-[10px] leading-[13px] text-balance [&amp;_a]:text-accentLight [&amp;_a]:font-bold [&amp;_a:hover]:underline group-[.subscribed]:hidden\">\n<p>By signing up, I agree to receive emails from The Intercept and to the <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/privacy-policy\/\">Privacy Policy<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/terms-use\/\">Terms of Use<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><!-- END-BLOCK(newsletter)[0] --><\/p>\n<h2 id=\"h-household-names-go-to-war\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Household Names Go to War<\/h2>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In May, the Pentagon <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2026\/may\/01\/pentagon-us-military-pairs-with-spacex-google-openai\">announced<\/a> that it has contracted with eight corporations to assist in development of ever more autonomous weapons: SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection, Microsoft, <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2025\/02\/18\/oracle-tiktok-israel-palestine-gaza\/\">Oracle<\/a>, and Amazon Web Services. The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.war.gov\/News\/Releases\/Release\/Article\/4475177\/classified-networks-ai-agreements\/\">Defense Department<\/a> sought these agreements to \u201caccelerate the transformation towards establishing the United States military as an AI-first fighting force and will strengthen our warfighters\u2019 ability to maintain decision superiority across all domains of warfare.\u201d Apparently, maintaining \u201cdecision superiority\u201d requires offloading lethal decisions \u2014 and the responsibility for making them \u2014 to nonhuman \u201cagents.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/learn.microsoft.com\/en-us\/compliance\/us-government\/gov-jwcc\">Microsoft<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/aws.amazon.com\/federal\/defense\/\">AWS<\/a> provide cloud storage and AI support to the Pentagon. Google signed a $200 million deal in April 2026 to allow the company\u2019s Gemini AI model to be used on a wide array of classified systems. As the New York Times <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/04\/28\/technology\/google-ai-deal-pentagon.html\">reported<\/a>, the Google agreement was signed <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2026\/03\/08\/openai-anthropic-military-contract-ethics-surveillance\/\">amid a dispute<\/a> between the Department of Defense and competitor Anthropic over that company\u2019s refusal to allow its AI to be used in autonomous weapons or for domestic surveillance. <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2026\/06\/06\/anthropic-ai-investor-abu-dhabi-china\/\">While Anthropic<\/a> and the DoD continue their spat, it appears that the firm is not above <a href=\"https:\/\/www.axios.com\/2026\/04\/19\/nsa-anthropic-mythos-pentagon\">selling its advanced Mythos model<\/a> to the Pentagon\u2019s bespoke cryptology and intelligence arm, the National Security Agency.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">SpaceX\u2019s famously right-wing and racist AI, Grok, is also <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/newshour\/world\/pentagon-embraces-musks-grok-ai-chatbot-as-it-draws-global-outcry\">working<\/a> for the DoD. This is the large language model that, you may remember, once <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2025\/11\/26\/grok-elon-musk-grokipedia-hitler\/\">renamed itself<\/a> MechaHitler. Just the nonhuman arbiter the world needs to assist in its life-or-death decisions.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Two other AI corporations specializing in surveillance technology \u2014 Palantir and Anduril \u2014 bear special mention. Palantir\u2019s founder was the billionaire Peter Thiel, a longtime supporter of President Donald Trump, who is now focusing on establishing pseudo-<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pr%C3%B3spera\">autonomous statelets<\/a> in places like Honduras and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/newshour\/nation\/peter-thiel-brings-his-lectures-on-the-antichrist-to-the-vaticans-doorstep\">warning the world<\/a> about the coming of the Antichrist, an apocalyptic <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2026\/04\/03\/trump-christian-right-iran-evangelicals\/\">biblical figure<\/a> found in the book of Revelation.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Palantir\u2019s flagship military project, the Maven Smart System, serves as the Pentagon\u2019s signature AI-enabled software platform. It uses AI and machine learning to automatically integrate data from satellites, drones, and other intelligence to identify and rank targets. It was Maven that identified those 1,000 targets in the <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2026\/03\/11\/podcast-trump-ai-world-wars\/\">first phase of the U.S.\u2013Israeli war on Iran<\/a>, including, presumably, the Minab school. Anduril\u2019s Lattice AI, Maven\u2019s direct competitor, has a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/news\/2026\/7\/27\/the-ai-military-complex-which-are-the-main-companies-in-it\">contract<\/a> for similar work with the U.S. Army.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"h-laws-about-laws\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Laws About LAWS<\/h2>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Although the development of lethal autonomous weapons systems has accelerated over the last few years with the rise of ever more powerful AI models, these systems have not outgrown existing international humanitarian law. The question, as with international law in general, is <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2025\/08\/06\/israel-palestine-war-crimes-icc-icj\/\">whether the international community<\/a> can <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2026\/07\/15\/trump-sanctions-international-criminal-court\/\">enforce those laws<\/a>. More specifically, whether autonomous weapons, along with other kinds of arms like chemical and biological weapons, fall under the so-called 1981 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. The United States ratified the CCW in 1995 and is therefore theoretically bound by it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Signatories to the CCW meet for periodic reviews, with the next one scheduled for November. Between reviews, a Group of Government Experts working specifically on LAWS develops its \u201crolling text\u201d of agreed-upon language for a possible future treaty on autonomous weapons. Membership in the GGE includes the parties to the CCW, along with international organizations like the International Red Cross, observer nations, and civil society organizations, including <a href=\"https:\/\/www.stopkillerrobots.org\/\">Stop Killer Robots<\/a>, whose constituent groups include Amnesty International and the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reachingcriticalwill.org\/\">Reaching Critical Will<\/a> project of the Women\u2019s International League for Peace and Freedom.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The GGE\u2019s most recent <a href=\"https:\/\/docs-library.unoda.org\/Convention_on_Certain_Conventional_Weapons_-Group_of_Governmental_Experts_on_Lethal_Autonomous_Weapons_Systems_(2026)\/GGE_LAWS_-_Rolling_Text_-_5_June_2026.pdf\">rolling text<\/a> came out in June and plainly states that nations are not free to just use any weapon they like; international humanitarian law applies to all weapons, including those not yet invented; human beings remain responsible for the actions of machines they set in motion; and international humanitarian law specifically covers the development and use of LAWS. Given how AI is accelerating the development and actual deployment of LAWS, the November CCW review will be crucial.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"promote-banner\">\n    <a class=\"promote-banner__link\" href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/tomdispatch\"><br \/><span class=\"promote-banner__image\"><br \/><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/TomDispatch_logo-promo-banner.jpg?fit=300%2C150\" class=\"attachment-medium size-medium\" alt=\"\" decoding=\"async\" srcset=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/TomDispatch_logo-promo-banner.jpg?w=500 500w, https:\/\/theintercept.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/TomDispatch_logo-promo-banner.jpg?w=300 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\"\/>        <\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"promote-banner__text\">\n<p class=\"promote-banner__eyebrow\">\n            Read Our Complete Coverage          <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><\/a><br \/><\/aside>\n<h2 id=\"h-keep-your-laws-off-our-planet\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Keep Your LAWS Off Our Planet<\/h2>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Advocates of machine-targeting and autonomous weapons argue that these systems make better decisions than their fallible human counterparts. But you might be a bit skeptical about this, if you\u2019ve ever seen autonomous taxis malfunction, like they did <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cbtnews.com\/waymo-robotaxi-incident-pile-up\/\">this Fourth of July<\/a> in San Francisco.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We\u2019ve seen how AIs can go rogue in a non-lethal setting. They secretly communicate with each other, deceive their human inventors, and will do anything necessary to achieve their goals \u2014 whatever the collateral damage. It\u2019s bad when their target is a company like Hugging Face in the context of a low-stakes training scenario. It is immeasurably worse when the collateral damage is human lives in the context of war.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Lethal autonomous weapons systems are dangerous enough when they work the way their creators intend. What will happen when, like Anthropic\u2019s and OpenAI\u2019s models, they crawl out of the sandbox and go rogue?<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p>#Time #Rein #Lethal #Drones<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Drone warfare, for many years,&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32900,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[246],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32899"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32899\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/32900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}