The Pentagon is aiming to increase funding more than a hundredfold for an autonomous drone warfare program, according to budget documents released this week, signalling a major pivot towards AI-powered war.
In its 2027 budget, the Pentagon has asked for over $54bn to fund the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, a 24,000% increase on last year.
An overview of the budget describes this money as going towards “autonomous and remotely operated systems across air, land, and above and below the sea,” including the “Drone Dominance” program.
The amount is over half the entire defence budget of the UK. In an opinion piece published yesterday, former CIA director David Petraeus said it was “the largest single commitment to autonomous warfare in history”.
However, Petraeus and others warned that the US military, and AI companies, are largely unprepared for the risks and responsibilities of autonomous war.
“I think every AI company should be pretty worried about the future of AI weapons,” said Jeffrey Ladish, director of Palisade Research and a former security researcher at Anthropic. Ladish said that autonomous systems could change the dynamics of military confrontation by making events such as coups easier to achieve and more common.
“Evaluators keep finding exploitable failures in even the most advanced systems,” said Peter Wallich, a former UK AI Security Institute official who advises MIT’s AI Risk Initiative.
“Every frontier AI system the UK AI Security Institute tested in December had exploitable safeguard failures … in a defence context, those failures could endanger warfighters and civilians.”
The Pentagon has been in a months-long dispute with the AI company Anthropic, after Anthropic attempted to prohibit it from using its model for mass surveillance or fully autonomous lethal weapons.
In the overview of its budget request, it reiterated its commitment to obtaining “the latest models from the top American frontier AI labs” to be used across the Department of Defense.
The Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG) is a newly-created Pentagon department. It has absorbed a previous Biden-era initiative which aimed to acquire low-cost drones for use in future combat in the Pacific.
It is not clear whether the money will be spent on acquiring existing technologies, or developing new ones. US officials have described the aim of the group as working with the private sector to test different systems for autonomous drones, with the aim of developing and integrating these drone technologies into the military.
The funding comes amid an ongoing effort by the US to sever parts of its defence-tech ecosystem from China, with sweeping bans on Chinese-made drones and components enacted last December.
Olaf Hichwa, the co-founder and chief technology officer of Neros Technologies, a US drone manufacturer, said he viewed the money as a positive sign that the Pentagon was responding to the rapid evolution in battlefield technologies, especially on the Ukrainian frontlines.
“What I’m excited for is that the Pentagon seems to be taking battlefield feedback seriously from Ukraine and from Centcom and around the world. This is a clear vote of confidence in small drones and I am hopeful it will be spent on useful systems,” he said.
However, he said he hoped the funding would be spent on proven innovations. “I do think the Department of War would benefit from an increased priority on useful autonomy. Sometimes we buy what looks good in a demo, because who doesn’t love a swarm demo that wows a lot of generals on a military base.
“But my optimistic view is that DAWG will know how to separate cool demo technology from useful, battlefield-ready technology, especially in the autonomy space.”
Questions remain over how the US might develop autonomous warfighting capabilities, and what this might entail.
Petraeus’s opinion piece said that the US does not have a military doctrine for how to deploy autonomous formations – such as drone swarms. These technologies are under development, for example by the Ukrainian software company Swarmer.
Petraeus also suggested that military leaders would need substantial training in how to manage and direct autonomous systems.
There is a growing ecosystem of US drone-tech companies that stand to benefit from this funding. These include established players such as Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, as well as startups such as Neros, Skydio and Powerus, a new drone-tech company which is backed by Donald Trump’s two eldest sons.
Some experts have suggested that the money could be better-spent elsewhere. Kristofer Harrison, a former State Department Russia specialist, said the funding “seems like a slush fund for Anduril”, and suggested the US might do better to work with Ukrainian drone producers, who are making cheaper drones in greater volumes than US startups.
“Instead of investing in Ukrainian technology that is being tested on the battlefield as we speak, we’re helping Peter Thiel line his pockets for hyper-specialized drones that have never been tested on the battlefield,” he said.
The Pentagon has been approached for comment.
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