AI could be giving US lethal edge in Iran war - but there are dangers

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Forget science fiction. The age of AI in war is here.

Israel has used AI systems in Gaza to flag potential targets and help prioritise operations.

The United States military reportedly used Anthropic's model, Claude, during its operation to abduct Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela.

And even after Anthropic got into difficulties with the US administration over exactly how AI should be used in war, the US military still apparently used Claude in its attack on Iran.

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It is highly possible, experts say, that the missiles flying over Tehran today are being targeted by systems powered by AI.

"AI is changing the nature of modern warfare in the 21st century. It is difficult to overstate the impact that it has and will have," says Craig Jones, a senior lecturer in political geography from Newcastle University.

"It is a potentially terrifying scenario."

Terrifying or not, it seems there's no going back. If you want a sense of the importance the US military places on AI, a good place to start is a memo sent by defence secretary Pete Hegseth, who styles himself Secretary of War, to all senior military leaders early this year.

"I direct the Department of War to accelerate America's Military AI Dominance by becoming an 'AI-first' warfighting force across all components, from front to back," Mr Hegseth wrote.

This is not an experiment, this is a command - to adopt AI quickly, and at scale.

Or as Hegseth puts it: "Speed Wins".

Yet the scenario in question is not the one that might first spring to mind.

Yes, autonomy is increasing in some areas. In Ukraine, for example, there are drones capable of continuing a mission even after losing contact with a human operator.

But we are not at the stage of autonomous killer robots stalking the battlefield.

"We're not in the Terminator era just yet," says David Leslie, professor of ethics, technology and society at Queen Mary University of London.

The systems in which AI is being embedded - known as "decision support systems" in military jargon - are advisers which flag targets, rank threats and suggest priorities.

AI systems can pull together satellite imagery, intercepted communications, logistics data and social media streams - thousands, even hundreds of thousands of inputs - and surface patterns far faster than any human team.

The idea is that they help cut through the fog of war, allowing commanders to focus resources where they matter most, while potentially being more accurate than tired, overwhelmed, stressed human soldiers.

This means they're not just a tool, says Dr Jones, but a new way of making decisions.

"AI, as we see in our own lives, is more like an infrastructure," he says. "It's built into the system."

"We have this ability to collect that surveillance that we've been doing for some years.

"But now AI gives a stability to act on that and to kill the leader of Iran and to take out serious adversaries and serious enemies and find them in improbable ways in which they may have not been found before."

'A very persuasive tool'

Professor Leslie agrees that the new systems are extremely capable from a military perspective.

"The race for speed is what's driving this uptake," he says. "Making decision-making cycles faster is what brings military advantage of lethality."

An important feature of decision support systems is that the AI doesn't press the button. A human does. That has been the central reassurance in debates about military AI. There is always "a human in the loop".

As OpenAI, the company which makes ChatGPT, put it after announcing a partnership to supply the Pentagon with AI: "We will have cleared forward-deployed OpenAI engineers helping the government, with cleared safety and alignment researchers in the loop."

OpenAI has also emphasised that it had secured agreement with the Pentagon that its technology would not be used in ways that cross three "red lines": mass domestic surveillance, direct autonomous weapons systems and high-stakes automated decisions.

But even with a human in the loop, a question remains.

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When you're fighting a war, can a human really check each decision from an AI? When time is compressed and information is incomplete, what does "human oversight" really mean?

"Humans are technically in the loop," says Dr Jones.

"That doesn't mean, in my opinion, that they are in the loop enough to have effective decision-making power and oversight of exactly what's happened. The AI… is a very persuasive tool to people that make decisions."

Or as Professor Leslie puts it: "We are really facing a potential scaled hazard of… rubber stamping, where because of the speed involved, you don't have active human, critical human engagement to assess the recommendations that are being put out by these systems."

And then there's the question of AI's own fallibility.

Testing by Sky News found that neither Claude nor ChatGPT could tell how many legs a chicken had, if the chicken didn't look as it expected.

What's more, the AI insisted it was right, even when it was clearly wrong.

The example came from a paper which illustrated dozens of examples of similar failures. "It's not a one-off example of animal legs," said lead author Anh Vo.

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"The problem is general across types of data and tasks," Vo added.

The reason is that AI doesn't really see the world in the human sense - they guess what's most probable based on past data.

Most of the time, that kind of statistical reasoning is astonishingly effective. The world is predictable enough that probabilities work.

But some environments are by their very nature unpredictable and high stakes.

We are testing the boundaries of this technology in the most unforgiving circumstances imaginable.

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