In the film, Skynet builds the Terminators, machines that find, track and kill humans. Strip away the science fiction and the idea is simple: combine sensors, software and weapons and reduce the human role.<\/p>\n
Human beings are doing exactly that, without anything resembling a malicious superintelligence like Skynet. In August 2026, Ukraine\u2019s Ministry of Defence said<\/a> its forces were using more than 70 AI and computer vision systems to strike targets. Algorithms can recognise equipment and personnel and lock onto those targets autonomously, so that a drone can complete its attack even if jamming cuts the link to the operator.<\/p>\n These systems need no general or super intelligence. They need sensors, software that can recognise a target, navigation and a weapon. And the more targeting is automated, the more the human\u2019s role shrinks to approving what the machine has already identified.<\/p>\n That\u2019s precisely where trust becomes the weak point.<\/p>\n The second risk is more subtle: AI shaping the decisions of the people who pull the triggers. <\/p>\n According to a recent CNN investigation<\/a>, in spring 2026, during the war with Iran, a US special operations analyst used an AI chatbot to assess intelligence about a Chinese ship in the Middle East. The chatbot, drawing on both open-source and classified material, wrongly identified the ship\u2019s cargo as components of a nuclear weapons programme. The analyst used AI again to package this into a standard intelligence report. <\/p>\n Armed personnel were preparing to board the ship and military aircraft were airborne before an official looked more closely and found the error. One source said the false report \u201calmost started a war\u201d. Any US operation against a Chinese vessel could risk spiralling into an armed conflict.<\/p>\n The AI was not conscious, hostile or out of control. It was simply wrong \u2013 but people trusted and acted on it.<\/p>\n \n The US military is pushing to weave AI<\/a> into almost every part of its work, from analysing intelligence to selecting targets. CNN\u2019s sources said errors of this kind are not uncommon across the intelligence community, and that pressure to produce intelligence faster is opening the door to mistakes. The ship incident was caught in time. The next error may not be.<\/p>\n At its heart, this is a problem of trust. LLMs produce fluent, confident language effortlessly \u2013 and, repackaged as an official report, an error gains an authority it never earned. Colleagues and I have argued<\/a> that these systems are built to produce an answer rather than to say \u201cI don\u2019t know\u201d. For example, in one experiment<\/a>, we found that non-specialists could not tell a chatbot\u2019s convincing but wrong physics answers from genuine expertise.<\/p>\n Policymakers often reassure us that a human makes the final decision. In the Chinese ship case, people were in the loop throughout. They simply became another stage through which the error was passed.<\/p>\n That fits decades of research on automation bias<\/a>, the tendency to over-rely on automated systems. It affects experts as well as novices. In 2003, US Patriot missile batteries shot down<\/a> two allied aircraft after operators accepted its misclassification.<\/p>\n A person in the loop works only when that human is able, adequately equipped and willing to challenge the machine. <\/p>\n That means verification. AI output should be clearly labelled, so its origin is visible to everyone who relies on it, and treated as a claim to be tested against independent sources before anyone acts on it. In war, the cost of not checking could hardly be higher.<\/p>\n None of these concerns over trusting AI in the short term mean long-term questions about advanced AI in the future should be dismissed. But much public anxiety focuses on what these systems might become, and less on what they are already doing.<\/p>\nThe war that AI almost started<\/h2>\n
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\n \u2018AI needs to be disarmed\u2019: Pope Leo sees threat to humanity in technological arms race<\/a>
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\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\nWhy a \u2018human in the loop\u2019 isn\u2019t enough<\/h2>\n
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