Military & security

Planning ahead to defend against cyber threats is the work that keeps events uneventful.

Multiple current Rockstar employees and union members based in the UK claim the Grand Theft Auto maker is failing its workforce.

The amphibious invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, remains the largest and most complex amphibious operation in history. On the first day alone, Allied forces landed eight divisions, including five amphibious assault and three airborne, totaling roughly 160,000 personnel. That force more than doubled within days.Normandy was unprecedented in scale but not in kind. A Taiwan invasion would present the reverse problem: Taiwan’s size is not the unprecedented part — the operational challenges are.

Autonomous agents, whether LLM-driven software agents or robotic physical agents, face a common class of failure modes when operating without continuous human oversight: safety violations from unverified actions, behavioral instability from unconstrained loops, and continuity loss from unhandled error states. We develop \system{}, a discrete-time control system that combines five execution gears (\Gobs{}, \Gsug{}, \Gplan{}, \Gexec{}, \Gint{}) with utility-gated dispatch and event-driven fallback

Reliable detection of openly carried and concealed knives remains a challenging problem in artificial intelligence (AI) due to the small size, thin geometry, frequent occlusion, and material variability of blade objects. Although advances in deep learning have improved weapon detection performance, the literature remains fragmented across sensing modalities, datasets, and evaluation protocols, limiting reproducibility and systematic comparison. This paper presents a systematic and modality-aware

Cyberspace has emerged as a fourth fundamental domain of human existence, yet philosophy lacks an integrated framework for addressing the ontological, epistemological, and ethical transformations it produces. This paper develops such a framework through the concept of cyber, defined here as the existential condition in which human life becomes constitutively entangled with digital technologies such that the virtual and the real cease to function as separable categories. Distinguished from Wiener

Listen now | 0:00 Grandpa Bob and author Bob 3:30 Why Bob stopped being an AI doom skeptic 6:59 Can AI solve China’s demographic crisis? 14:09 The irony of China’s open-source AI strategy 17:12 Recursive self-improvement and the singularity 23:33 The Burkean conservative case against AI 38:00 Are we becoming AI meat puppets? 46:32 Google Maps, AI, and the death of interhuman reliance 51:24 Was Pete Hegseth’s military strategy written by a chatbot? 56:45 Trump and Iran: Peace? Wider war? Other? 1

CSET’s Sam Bresnick shared his expert insight in a newsletter segment published by Politico. The article examines the evolving U.S.–China AI competition, focusing on how cost-efficient Chinese AI models are beginning to gain traction globally and what that could mean for the long-term balance of technological and economic power in artificial intelligence. The post When cheap AI becomes a secret weapon appeared first on Center for Security and Emerging Technology .

On Friday, June 26, EPIC filed an amicus brief alongside civil liberties and criminal defense organizations in New York v. Morris, an important case about cell phone privacy rights during criminal investigations. The brief was filed with the American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Civil Liberties Union, the Legal Aid Society, the Center for … Continued

In this "Heard it From a CISO" video, Silverfort CISO John Paul Cunningham explains that AI in cybersecurity workflows is creating opportunities rather than eliminating jobs — and there are more ways than ever to break into this essential field.

AI is shrinking the gap between skill and ability for those who want to conduct cyberattacks, BKC Affiliate Bruce Schneier argues in The Guardian. Models merely need user to direction to identify and ...

The extent of China’s drone dominance — and how to decouple from it — has long been a source of debate and anxiety in Washington. Last month, the Wall Street Journal reignited controversy by publishing a visual analysis of military quadcopter components, exploring China’s advantages in parts manufacturing and cost. The director of the Defense Innovation Unit objected to the report, stating on X that “By leaving out the dozens of U.S. companies that have plunged into drone component manufacturing

Roeser (2026) emphasizes the role of emotions in risk-assessment, including risks about nuclear weapons. This is a highly valuable comment. I build upon it with a concrete example: Kenneth Waltz found the risk of nuclear war to be acceptable, but shied away from a world government because of the risk of global civil war. Future philosophical research on nuclear weapons should critically examine the processes behind such judgments about acceptable risk.

This article was originally published by IAPP linked here. Five Eyes highlights rising AI cyber risk, as the author explores practical legal, compliance and business steps organizations can take to strengthen resilience. Last week, the cybersecurity agencies of Five Eyes released a statement, “The AI shift in cyber risk: Why leaders must act now.” For [...] The post Thought for the week: Five Eyes call to action for business leaders on AI-driven cyber risk appeared first on Connect On Tech .

As the relationship between the United States and Canada continues to degrade, it now comes at the expense of each country’s industrial security.Last month, the Pentagon announced the unilateral suspension of the 86-year-old Canadian Permanent Joint Board on Defense in response to what the White House sees as Ottawa’s failure to present a credible plan to spend 3.5 percent of GDP on defense by 2035. And the opening of the gleaming new bridge between Detroit and Windsor has been long delayed in t

During the Cold War, Europe kept asking whether Washington would risk an American city to save a European one. It was an impolite question, but a useful one, which is why it never quite left the room. It has now packed its bags and moved east. Earlier this year, French President Emmanuel Macron created quite a stir with an important speech on French nuclear weapons policy. Under what he called a new path of dissuasion avancée, or “forward deterrence,” he declared that just as French strategic su

Hallucination is the reliability bottleneck for LLM-based agents, and fact attribution verifiers are the last line of defense -- yet today's verifiers emit only opaque binary labels, leaving agents unable to self-correct and operators unable to audit. We present SEVA, a structured verification agent that emits evidence alignments, step-by-step reasoning chains, calibrated confidence, and a six-category error diagnosis with actionable fixes. Training such an agent with RL is non-trivial: standard

Inference-time safety methods for large language models have proliferated, yet no systematic comparison exists. We evaluate five defense paradigms (no defense, static steering, CAST, AlphaSteer, probe-gated) across seven instruction-tuned models (7-31B) and five attack types (GCG, AutoDAN, DeepInception, prefilling, intent laundering). Our central finding: prompt-time activation defenses are structurally blind to prefilling attacks. AlphaSteer achieves 0% attack success on GCG, AutoDAN, and inte

International humanitarian law protects civilians from direct attack unless and for such time as they take direct part in hostilities, with the ICRC's 2009 Interpretive Guidance operationalising this rule through a three-criterion cumulative test. This paper argues that AI-mediated civilian cyber operations challenge the direct causation element of this test in a structurally specific way: when a civilian deploys an autonomous multi-agent cyber system of the kind recently demonstrated in offensi

The transition from static chat bots to autonomous agents--equipped with persistent memory, tool-use protocols, and multi-agent collaboration--has fundamentally expanded the AI threat landscape. Current defense mechanisms, such as perimeter security and training-time alignment, remain external to the agent's active reasoning loop. Consequently, they fall short: a fully aligned agent remains highly vulnerable to runtime hijacking via memory poisoning, tool-chain manipulation, or multi-agent proto

The most significant factor currently shaping global AI policy is AI's real and projected national security risks. We are entering an AI-driven state of exception | Edition #301

This is not science fiction. It’s not premature. If towns, cities, states, or the federal government want to act to reign in the emergence of armed police drones and robots , we have precious little time. In the absence of substantial regulation around when and how domestic law enforcement in the United States can deploy force using drones, the companies that markets technology to law enforcement have been moving. It’s past time concerned people take notice. Cities should not procure weaponized

Nuclear policy debates are at their best when they force hard questions about risk, deterrence, and military necessity. They are at their worst when disagreement is recast as bad faith. In 2018, as an outgrowth of a rigorous policy review process, the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review identified a need for supplemental low-yield nuclear capabilities to augment the U.S. nuclear arsenal. This was presented as an effort to raise the nuclear threshold of adversaries who may believe they

The next war will be won by whoever can manufacture cheap, software-defined unmanned systems faster than the other side can destroy them.

To understand how close Myanmar’s pro-democracy resistance came to victory last year — and how far it has slipped since — there is no sharper microcosm than the story of a Gen Z sniper. In April 2025, a female teenager, Anina, enraptured the world, her youth-driven “Spring Revolution” a vivid foil to the sclerotic forces of military dictator Min Aung Hlaing (officially called the Tatmadaw). When her unit captured the town of Falam, fortune seemed on the resistance’s side. Yet, a year later, regi

While studying degraded grasslands in northern China, one scientist started keeping chickens — and discovered a secret weapon against desertification.

Prompt injection is the top security risk for LLM-integrated applications, yet every defense proposed so far has been broken. We prove this is not a coincidence: in shared-embedding architectures that lack enforced control-data separation, perfect prompt-injection prevention is mathematically impossible. We formalize prompted systems as Prompted Action Models whose outputs include control-authoritative actions: refusal decisions, tool authorization, policy routing, and memory writes. We define S

In 2024, Paul Scharre and Michael Depp wrote, “Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear Stability,” where they argued integrating artificial intelligence into the nuclear chain of command presents both opportunities and risks. Two years later, as AI becomes increasingly integrated into military systems and processes, we asked them to revisit their arguments. Image: Senior Airman Jason Wiese via Wikimedia CommonsIn 2024, you argued that integrating artificial intelligence into the nuclear chain of com

Training-time data poisoning during fine-tuning poses a significant threat to large language models (LLMs) deployed for abstractive text summarization, where small task-specific datasets exert disproportionate influence on model behavior. In this setting, adversaries manipulate fine-tuning data to induce persistent summarization failures, such as biased or harmful summaries, while preserving standard evaluation metrics. We present a unified post-hoc defense framework for detecting and remediatin

This exclusive Cogs of War interview is with Maxwell Maduka, the co-founder and chief engineer of Terra Industries, an African defense technology company building autonomous drone and counter-drone systems designed for the continent’s operating conditions. As cheap imported airframes flood African markets and non-state actors employ drones across the Sahel, we asked Max why Terra is betting on Africa building its own defense industrial base.Cheap Turkish and Chinese drones and sensor systems hav

Armies run on more than what happens at the front. Behind every operation is a vast amount of coordination, administration, logistics, and judgment. Bill Pessin, senior vice president of national security at Salesforce and a former U.S. Army logistics officer, joins Jonathan to discuss how military organizations can use AI agents, what makes these tools different from ordinary software, and why safety and accountability matter when new technology enters national security work. They also discuss

Black-box LLMs (accessible only via API) are vulnerable to distillation attacks, in which an attacker queries the model and trains a student on its outputs. A recent line of work proposes output perturbation defenses that modify the teacher's output to reduce student performance while preserving utility for legitimate users. As a relatively new family of approaches, output perturbation defenses lack a shared threat model, making it difficult to compare them, reason about composing them with othe

Scientists do not, by profession, wage war. Yet warfare's vocabulary consistently appears in their abstracts. To quantify the extent to which warfare's vocabulary pervades scientific abstracts, we analyze 21.4 million papers (2010-2025; OpenAlex, PubMed). We additionally run a within-subject war-framing experiment (N = 801; 32,040 trials) designed to provide causal insight into the effects of militaristic language on persuasion. Between 2010 and 2025, the presence of militaristic terms in scient

AI-enabled cyber-physical systems (AI-CPS) turn data-driven decisions into physical actions, creating assurance challenges across sensing, computation, control, human oversight, and governance. ISO/IEC 42001:2023 specifies requirements for an artificial intelligence management system (AIMS), but conformity assessment alone does not show which architectural layers are affected, whether practices are mature enough for the risk context, or what actions should follow. We present CEDAR-42001 (Control

In 2025 and 2026, two events settled questions that had until then been speculative. In the first, a large language model executed the great majority of a state-aligned cyber-espionage campaign on its own, with human operators intervening at only a few decision points. In the second, the most capable cyber-relevant model was placed under a controlled-access program limited to a vetted set of United States technology firms, allied governments, and European standards bodies; that perimeter include

AI systems are increasingly evaluated in bounded environments that combine isolation, simulation, instrumentation, supervision, and evidence capture. For physical AI, AIoT, and cyber-physical systems, this shift is not a matter of terminology: the system under test may sense, decide, actuate, communicate, and fail through physical processes, networked devices, and human operators. This article develops an assurance-oriented account of AI sandboxes as controlled environments for testing, evaluati

Safe coordination in networked cyber-physical systems forces learning algorithms to simultaneously handle hybrid discrete-continuous actions, hard training-time safety constraints, and physics-governed dynamics. We show that these three features form a directed cycle of biases that defeats any naive composition of off-the-shelf modules, and formalize this as a three-way coupling lemma. We then introduce TRIDENT, the first MARL framework whose three components are co-designed to cancel each leak:

Indirect prompt injection attacks hijack LLM-based agents by embedding malicious instructions in third-party data that the agent retrieves during task execution. Existing defenses report near-zero attack success rate on static benchmarks, yet recent adaptive evaluations show that these results collapse once the attacker is allowed to optimize against the deployed defense. In this work, we trace this collapse to two failure modes. First, existing defense methods are confined to recognizing specif

The rapid emergence of autonomous AI agents is transforming artificial intelligence from isolated model inference into distributed systems of reasoning, communication, and action. This paper develops the vision of the Internet of Agentic AI (IoAI): an open ecosystem in which heterogeneous agents discover one another, negotiate responsibilities, exchange context, invoke tools, and execute workflows across cloud, edge, device, organizational, and cyber-physical environments. We synthesize foundati

The advancement of AI capabilities compels researchers and the public to be more aware of its potential worldwide impact. A pressing near-term concern is the regulation of military AI applications. Armament manufacturers and defense contractors are increasingly investing in AI capabilities and forging partnerships with AI companies, creating a burgeoning coalition that demands military leaders, arms control diplomacy experts, and AI researchers collaborate to ensure a safer future. While AI rese