Anthony De Luca-Baratta, and Joshua Curtis
The Trump administration’s AI Action Plan seeks to curb lethal AI proliferation, but conflicting priorities on innovation, security, and open-source models risk undermining its effectiveness.
A year ago, we argued in The National Interest that artificial intelligence (AI)-powered autonomous weapons threaten to destabilize the international system. Technological and battlefield developments over the previous year have made the threat even more urgent. The need for US leadership to slow the spread of lethal AI is clearer now than ever. The Trump administration’s AI Action Plan is a welcome step in the right direction, though it suffers from internal tensions that could ultimately render it counterproductive.
The Double-Edged Sword of AI
By lowering the barriers to acquiring high levels of precision firepower and enabling automated kill chains, AI-powered autonomous weapons are rebalancing the battlefield, allowing smaller, poorer actors to better exploit asymmetric advantages. For instance, loitering munitions—First Person View (FPV) drones enhanced by AI to autonomously identify and engage targets even without GPS or humans in the loop—have allowed the Ukrainian military to partially close its firepower gap with Russia. Similarly, cheap drones, including loitering munitions, may end up reinforcing Taiwan’s daunting geography against a Chinese amphibious invasion.
But the digitization of warfare underlying this reordering is a double-edged sword. Low barriers to acquisition and operation of high levels of precision firepower will enable dangerous actors like terrorist organizations, criminal networks, and rogue states. Furthermore, actors of all kinds using AI-enabled autonomous weapons—but especially low-capacity actors that most benefit from the AI weaponry revolution—are likely to instigate more unintended escalations.
A case in point: in late 2024, Russia had already used Iranian Shahed-136 drones to regain the upper hand on the frontlines and devastate Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. Iran, for its part, had begun using these drones to terrorize Israeli civilians.
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