AI has entered the war room, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon, according to experts.
Despite President Donald Trump telling federal agencies and military contractors to cease business with Anthropic, the U.S. military reportedly used the company’s AI model, Claude, in its attack on Iran, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Now, some experts are raising concerns about the use of AI in war operations. “The AI machine is making recommendations for what to target, which is actually much quicker in some ways than the speed of thought,” Craig Jones, author of The War Lawyers: The United States, Israel, and Juridical Warfare, which examines the role of military lawyers in modern war, told the Guardian.
In a conversation with Fortune, Jones, a lecturer at Newcastle University on war and conflict, said AI has vastly accelerated the “kill chain,” compressing the time from initial target identification to final destruction. He said the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, which resulted in the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, might not have happened absent AI.
“It would have been impossible, or almost impossible, to do in that way,” Jones told Fortune. “The speed it was carried out, and the magnitude and the volume of the strikes, I think, are AI-enabled.”
