Some military leaders are wary of how artificial intelligence will be employed moving forward, even as the Department of War pushes for its expansion in departmental purposes.
The head of U.S. Special Operations Command, Adm. Frank Bradley, said during a conference recently that U.S. troops “have to be very careful about how we come to [AI’s] employment and its inspiration into the delivery of lethality.” He added that while he believes that AI could determine what targets to hit, “We, as humans, have to have the confidence that … it’s going to deliver violence only where we intend it to be delivered.”
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As the head of SOCOM, Bradley oversees the units that handle the military’s most dangerous and difficult operations.
During Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s tenure, the department has emphasized prioritizing the development of its AI capabilities and has agreed to deal with several relevant companies to use their platforms in classified and non-classified settings. In early May, the department announced its newest slate of deals with SpaceX, OpenAI, Oracle, Google, Nvidia, Reflection, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services to use their services in classified settings.
There are also more mundane, non-classified applications for AI.
Melissa Johnson, the top acquisition official for Special Operations Command, said AI should be “reducing the cognitive workload on mundane tasks,” while Sgt. Maj. Andrew Krogman, the top enlisted official for SOCOM, agreed, saying he sees AI as equipped to handle administrative tasks.
The question of whether AI companies or the military should have control of the software has already become a highly scrutinized issue. Earlier this year, the Pentagon got into a dispute with Anthropic, the company that oversees the Claude platform, over concerns about the department’s possible use of the platform for mass surveillance and fully autonomous armed drones.
The department ultimately designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk, which it has sued over, and the cases continue to move through the court system. The company has continued to engage with the administration despite the pending litigation about solutions to their concerns.
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“The advantage that AI provides, applied to any number of capabilities, whether it’s domain awareness, targeting cycles, you name it, AI, and leveraging it, that’s why we’ve made it the forefront,” Hegseth said during a congressional hearing in late April. “It’s AI-first with everything we do, integrating it at every potential echelon to ensure we can respond faster. If we’re better at that than any adversary is, it’s going to give us an advantage, and we have to maintain that.”
In January, while addressing SpaceX employees, Hegseth said he wants military AI systems to operate “without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications,” before adding that the Pentagon’s “AI will not be woke.”
