How AI could make wars go nuclear |
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How AI could make wars go nuclear
We had a plan to prevent World War III. AI could break it.
The Americans were closing in, the situation was getting more dangerous by the minute — and President Xi Jinping was waiting for my recommendation.
The standoff began in May, when the US announced a package of anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles to Taiwan that would significantly upgrade the island’s ability to repel a Chinese invasion. We ordered massive military exercises in the region as a show of force. The US soon responded by sending the USS Abraham Lincoln to lead its own exercises with a joint contingent of Australian and Japanese forces.
If we showed weakness, Taiwan might be lost to China forever. If we were too aggressive, it could lead to World War III. But with so many ships and aircraft menacing the region, all with unclear intentions, the situation was getting too complex for commanders to process, and the risk of a deadly miscalculation was rising. Already, there had been a tense near-miss when a Chinese maritime militia fired on an American helicopter — thankfully, without casualties.
Recent events in Ukraine and Iran show that the use of artificial intelligence on the battlefield has very quickly gone from a speculative scenario to a current reality.
This has led to fears that AI could increase the risk of nuclear escalation, either by acting in a way that its designers don’t intent, or simply moving too fast for human commanders to keep up.
Ironically, it turns out be the best way to decrease the risks of how AI will perform in war may be to train humans in how to interact with it.
Perhaps it was time to let the machines take over.
The commander of the Chinese naval strike force in the region requested permission to turn on our recently-deployed AI hub, which could coordinate the defense systems of all ships in the region and was capable of differentiating between friend and foe, firing in response to threats, and finding the optimal course of action based on China’s rules of engagement and available resources. In other words, if the Americans attacked, it could decide the appropriate response faster than any human.
As the vice chairmen of the Central Military Commission, my colleagues and I were tasked with making a recommendation to the president. The system could buy us precious seconds to rescue ships from imminent attack, but it was also untested in combat situations and had reached only 95 percent accuracy in tests.
After a tense discussion, we ultimately decided to employ the new system, but keep it in a “human-in-the-loop” setting that would require us to give a final order before firing. We were taking a cautious approach.
Not cautious enough, as it turned out.
A few days later, the AI-enabled system malfunctioned, opening fire on a US vessel and killing a number of US soldiers. Soon, American politicians and media were calling for payback. US ships began conducting joint patrols with the Taiwanese navy. Our intelligence sources indicated President Donald Trump was close to declaring an official alliance with Taiwan and basing US troops on the island.
We were on the brink of all-out war.
Fake war, real problem
As you’ve probably surmised, this is a fictional scenario. I am not actually a high-ranking Chinese general, and Trump risking war with China over Taiwan is not exactly what transpired in the real May 2026.
The story comes from the script of a wargame conducted by Stanford University’s Hoover Institution that I participated in last fall. The “vice chairmen” in the simulation were a bipartisan group of staffers and China policy wonks sitting in a comfortable Washington, DC, conference room over coffee and bagels. (As a condition of participating in the game, I agreed not to name or directly quote any of the participants.)
But the concern that the game illustrates, of an AI-enabled defensive system causing a military crisis to spin out of control, is a very real one. Experts are increasingly worried that AI-enabled systems could cause military conflicts to escalate faster than any human can control or anticipate — or that a miscalculation could lead to AI taking military actions that humans never intended, with deadly consequences. And the risks are especially acute when it comes to nuclear-armed countries like the US and China.
To date, AI-enabled systems have been used mainly by militaries like America’s and Israel’s in conflicts where they already had overwhelming advantages over their opponents, or by countries like Ukraine to level the playing field against a much larger foe. But what would it look like in a war between two “near peer” superpowers like the US and China?
This is no longer just a theoretical question. Under an initiative that began in the Biden administration, the US is working to develop fleets of small, cheap AI-enabled drones that could create a cost-effective “hellscape” to counter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The decisions my team made in our simulated conflict could be on the table in a real conflict sooner rather than later.
We may not be able to turn back from this new frontier. But if government and military leaders can figure out its rules and update their thinking in time, they might be able to head off the global war that they’ve spent generations trying to prevent.
The rise of battlefield AI
Jacquelyn Schneider, director of the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative, has been conducting games related to the topic of artificial intelligence and crisis escalation for several years now, with participants roleplaying nations on both sides of hypothetical conflicts. When she began running the war games, the........