Defense and intelligence agencies are increasingly relying on artificial intelligence (AI) systems to augment their capabilities, including for pattern recognition in intelligence gathering and scenario planning for contingency operations. Yet one of the core issues of AI and large language models is that we have never truly understood the logic underpinning them, scientists say. These systems have been compared to a black box that provides answers without showing the reasoning to support the outcomes.

To understand the logic of AI systems, Kenneth Payne, a professor of strategy at King's College London, designed a series of war gaming simulations between two competing AIs and found that in nearly every scenario, nuclear escalation was unavoidable. He published his findings, which have not been peer-reviewed, Feb. 16 in the arXiv preprint database.