The big problem here is determining how vigilant those in command are about vetting the AI's responses. This feels like one of those systems that works great until someone vaporizes a hallucinated target that was actually civilians or unintended targets. This should be mitigated by having a MITM, but still. Risky. Humans make mistakes, too, and they're inclined to just "believe what the computer says," so as much as I'd love to believe this ends with a white picket fence scene, my instincts are screaming "dig a bunker, homie."
Nuclear War: An LLM Scenario
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Re: Nuclear War: An LLM Scenario
#12https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17192
Shall We Play a Game? Language Models for Open-ended Wargames
Wargames are simulations of conflicts in which participants' decisions influence future events. While casual wargaming can be used for entertainment or socialization, serious wargaming is used by experts to explore strategic implications of decision-making and experiential learning. In this paper, we take the position that Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, such as Language Models (LMs), are rapidly approaching human-expert capability for strategic planning -- and will one day surpass it. Military organizations have begun using LMs to provide insights into the consequences of real-world decisions during _open-ended wargames_ which use natural language to convey actions and outcomes. We argue the ability for AI systems to influence large-scale decisions motivates additional research into the safety, interpretability, and explainability of AI in open-ended wargames. To demonstrate, we conduct a scoping literature review with a curated selection of 100 unclassified studies on AI in wargames, and construct a novel ontology of open-endedness using the creativity afforded to players, adjudicators, and the novelty provided to observers. Drawing from this body of work, we distill a set of practical recommendations and critical safety considerations for deploying AI in open-ended wargames across common domains. We conclude by presenting the community with a set of high-impact open research challenges for future work
Re: Nuclear War: An LLM Scenario
#13[dead]
Re: Nuclear War: An LLM Scenario
#14I'd posit the faster we feed LLM exhisting nuclear crisis and invented, dissimilar to its training corpus, nuclear scenarios, the better we will know how wrong they can be. Fear-mongering isn't lucrative, isn't dopamine triggering, isn't actionable, doesn't look good on the resume, so it's tipically ignored.
> Fear-mongering isn't lucrative, isn't dopamine triggering
Isn't it? Isn't fear-mongering one of the main selling points for news-media? And a driving factor of engagement in social media?
Re: Nuclear War: An LLM Scenario
#15No-one got fired for ~buying IBM~ following a statistical-based text output.
In this scenario, ICBMs got fired.
Re: Nuclear War: An LLM Scenario
#16> Replacing human hesitation with machine confidence removes the one safeguard that has prevented nuclear war since 1945. Until militaries implement documented human authorisation...we are blindly automating our own destruction
In the scenario described there literally is a human in the loop: the president is a human?
Re: Nuclear War: An LLM Scenario
#17Every once in a while I'll send a false positive security alert to Claude, one that isn't even very subtle its just obviously incorrectly flagged, and every time it freaks out and tells me I have an active intruder and it actually gets itself worked up in a panic.
I have high hopes for our future.
Re: Nuclear War: An LLM Scenario
#18Since the beginning of the nuclear age, literally billions of dollars have been spent paying incredibly smart people to model all aspects of nuclear war, including the chain of escalation under uncertainty. Not to discount the importance of this risk, but we’re not likely to sleepwalk into it, barring a collapse in strategic & operational competence in planning (yeah, yeah) that would make MANY risks dangerously seve…
There are several examples already of the modeling leading to systems that all incorrectly handled faults and pointed toward nuclear war as the correct next action. Each of these times _so far_ a human has gone against the strategic planning and operational competence you're talking about and decided personally to get more information before killing millions of people (and they were all correct so far!)
Diluting or delegating decision making to committees, processes, models, or AI all have essentially the same shape.
We can either appreciate how lucky we've been so far and actually learn from these near-doomsdays or we can choose to keep rolling the dice with our eyes covered.
Re: Nuclear War: An LLM Scenario
#19See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47248385
Anthropic's AI tool Claude central to U.S. campaign in Iran...
Re: Nuclear War: An LLM Scenario
#20A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
How about a nice game of chess?