{"id":368590,"date":"2026-03-05T04:56:19","date_gmt":"2026-03-05T04:56:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/368590\/"},"modified":"2026-03-05T04:56:19","modified_gmt":"2026-03-05T04:56:19","slug":"what-ai-models-for-war-actually-look-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/368590\/","title":{"rendered":"What AI Models for War Actually Look Like"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anthropic might have misgivings about giving the US military unfettered access<\/a> to its AI models, but some startups are building advanced AI specifically for military applications.<\/p>\n

Smack Technologies<\/a>, which announced a $32 million funding round this week, is developing models that it says will soon surpass Claude\u2019s capabilities when it comes to planning and executing military operations. And, unlike Anthropic, the startup appears less concerned with banning specific types of military use.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you serve in the military, you take an oath you’re going to serve honorably, lawfully, in accordance with the rules of war,\u201d says CEO Andy Markoff. \u201cTo me, the people who deploy the technology and make sure it is used ethically need to be in a uniform.\u201d<\/p>\n

Markoff is hardly a regular AI executive. A former commander in the US Marine Forces Special Operations Command, he helped execute high-stakes special forces operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. He cofounded Smack with Clint Alanis, another ex-Marine, and Dan Gould, a computer scientist who previously worked as the VP of technology at Tinder.<\/p>\n

Smack\u2019s models learn to identify optimal mission plans through a process of trial and error, similar to how Google trained its 2017 program AlphaGo<\/a>. In Smack\u2019s case, the strategy involves running the model through various war game scenarios and having expert analysts provide a signal that tells the model if its chosen strategy will pay off. The startup may not have the budget of a conventional frontier AI lab, but it\u2019s spending millions to train its first AI models, Markoff says.<\/p>\n

Battle Lines<\/p>\n

Military use of AI has become a hot topic in Silicon Valley after officials at the Department of Defense went head-to-head with Anthropic executives<\/a> over the terms of a roughly $200 million contract.<\/p>\n

One of the issues that led to the breakdown, which resulted in defense secretary Pete Hegseth declaring Anthropic a supply chain risk<\/a>, was Anthropic\u2019s desire to limit the use of its models in autonomous weapons.<\/p>\n

Markoff says the furor obscures the fact that today\u2019s large language models are not optimized for military use. General-purpose models like Claude are good at summarizing reports, he says. But they\u2019re not trained on military data and lack a human-level understanding of the physical world, making them ill suited to controlling physical hardware. \u201cI can tell you they are absolutely not capable of target identification,\u201d Markoff claims.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo one that I’m aware of in the Department of War is talking about fully automating the kill chain,\u201d he claims, referring to the steps involved in making decisions on the use of deadly force.<\/p>\n

Mission Scope<\/p>\n

The US and other militaries already use autonomous weapons in certain situations, including in missile defense systems that need to react at superhuman speeds.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe US and over 30 other states are already deploying weapon systems with varying degrees of autonomy, including some I would define as fully autonomous,\u201d claims Rebecca Crootof, an authority on the legal issues surrounding autonomous weapons at the University of Richmond School of Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the future, specialized models like the one Smack is working on could be used for mission planning purposes, too, according to Markoff. The company\u2019s models are meant to help commanders automate much of the drudgery involved in sketching out mission plans. Planning military missions is still typically done manually with whiteboards and notepads, Markoff says.<\/p>\n

If the US went to war with a \u201cnear peer\u201d such as Russia or China, Markoff says, automated decisionmaking could offer the US a much needed \u201cdecision dominance.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s still an open question whether AI could be used reliably in such circumstances. One recent experiment, run by a researcher at King\u2019s College London, alarmingly showed that LLMs tended to escalate<\/a> nuclear conflicts in war games.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anthropic might have misgivings about giving the US military unfettered access to its AI models, but some startups…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":368591,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,20143,6006,289,290,18,19,17,1538,307,4670,238,82,1545],"class_list":{"0":"post-368590","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-ai-lab","10":"tag-anthropic","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence","12":"tag-artificialintelligence","13":"tag-eire","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-military","17":"tag-openai","18":"tag-silicon-valley","19":"tag-startups","20":"tag-technology","21":"tag-war"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116174794490385023","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=368590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368590\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/368591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=368590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=368590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=368590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}