How AI Is Reshaping the Battlefield

Galaxy Brain

The Atlantic

Technology

4.5 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2026

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Just how are powerful AI models being used in warfare overseas? In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel sits down with Wired senior writer Will Knight to discuss the rise of autonomous weapons. From the origins of Project Maven to the recent falling-out between Anthropic and the U.S. Department of Defense, they trace what’s happening as artificial intelligence moves from summarizing documents to informing decisions on the battlefield. How do these weapons work? What are the safeguards? Who decides what values get baked into these models? As autonomous systems become harder to avoid, where exactly is the line between human judgment and machine decision making? Warzel and Knight help explain how the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are more entangled than ever and where warfare goes from here. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The US government will talk a lot about the importance of AI reflecting American values.
0:03.9	But what are those values exactly?
0:05.7	Do we get to decide those values together?
0:07.6	Who gets to decide that? Is that just Trump or is it just the heads of these companies?
0:15.9	I'm Charlie Wurzel and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we are going to talk about
0:20.2	autonomous weapons
0:21.5	in the future of AI and warfare. It's a very strange time to be covering artificial intelligence.
0:27.7	There is an active conflict in Iran, which artificial intelligence is being used. There's also this
0:33.5	huge fallout between the AI company Anthropic and the Department of Defense over concerns
0:38.3	about the use of their technologies. And there's this broader feeling right now over the subject of
0:44.4	autonomous weapons that, frankly, these companies have this very powerful technology, that they
0:51.2	are then handing to the military. And that technology is being used in ways that
0:56.6	maybe these companies don't feel like they have control over and that these companies are
1:01.4	certainly worried about. There are so many moral, legal, ethical concerns. There's so much that
1:07.3	we don't know about how these models actually work, the decisions that they make,
1:12.6	whether they hallucinate, whether they can fail at rates different and more concerning than humans,
1:18.2	whether humans are in the chain making these decisions, whether there are the appropriate safeguards,
1:24.3	whether the ideologies of these companies and their leaders actually fit the
1:28.1	ideologies of the military and whether that conflict is something that we should all be having
1:32.1	a real conversation about. It's such a messy, scary moment, and Silicon Valley is totally
1:41.7	caught up inside of it. So I asked Will Knight to join me to talk about all of this.
1:46.7	Will is a senior writer for Wired. He covers artificial intelligence and he writes their AI lab newsletter.
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