Anthropic’s fight with the Pentagon highlights the risks of autonomous warfare — but obscures just how close it is.
Hayden Field
is The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.
The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, an international forum that focuses on lethal autonomous systems, is hosted twice a year at the United Nations in Geneva. When Branka Marijan attended in November 2017, she thought the five-day sessions — which dealt largely in hypotheticals, speculating on a world where warfare was fought with killer robots — would be business as usual. After all, this was technology some thought might never be developed, and likely never deployed. That year, she quickly realized, was different. That distant, imagined future was suddenly closer and realer than ever.
On the first day, some attendees watched a
to an audience.AI, he said, would not be selecting a target in combat “anytime soon.” But now, without intervention, that moment isn’t far off.
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