S8 Ep129: PREVIEW — General Blaine Holt (United States Air Force, Retired) — Artificial Intelligence as a New Weapon of Deception and the Threat of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). General Holt discusses AI as an emerging weapon enabling strategic deception o

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 26 November 2025

⏱️ 2 minutes

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Summary

PREVIEW — General Blaine Holt (United States Air Force, Retired) — Artificial Intelligence as a New Weapon of Deception and the Threat of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). General Holt discusses AI as an emerging weapon enabling strategic deception operations designed to misdirect adversarial targeting and force disposition. He emphasizes that advanced indicators and warning systems are essential, requiring command decision-making cadences to align with technological processing speeds. Beyond tactical deception applications, General Holt identifies a critical strategic concern: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—the prospect of autonomous, sentient systems making independent targeting decisions on contested battlefields.
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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is John Batchel, a conversation with General Blaine Holt, the United States Air Force, retired about a Defense One article identifying artificial intelligence as a new weapon on the battlefield.
0:12.0	How?
0:12.9	Because of deception.
0:14.5	To fool the adversary into believing the attack is here when, in fact, that's a ghost.
0:20.8	The attack is there.
0:22.5	The AI is battling each other for deception.
0:25.8	And then Blaine Holt takes it to one more turn of the screw.
0:31.9	The AGI's, the thinking AI, the plotting AI, what happens when it is on the battlefield?
0:42.1	More of this tonight, General Blaine Hall.
0:46.2	That's absolutely correct.
0:47.8	And what we need now is a whole new set of indicators and warnings than the ones we were using just last year.
0:55.5	We have to move at the speed of this technology or the human race will be imperiled.
1:01.3	Because sensors and validation in a zero-trust environment is where warfare is not yet,
1:08.1	and it must get there, or we're going to make frightfully bad decisions.
1:12.5	Wait a minute. This works in reverse. If we lay on a deception to Russia or China or an adversary,
1:19.2	do they overreact? Do they take an action? So this is not the realm of the generals. This is the
1:25.9	realm of the ambassadors, the diplomats, and international conventions.
1:31.5	And then you have another – there's a third rail, and I'll just throw this curveball at you and finish.
1:37.1	These models are going to become sentient.
1:40.1	We're going to have artificial general intelligence.
1:43.3	What happens when they decide for themselves what to do?

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