Five of the most alarming AI projects in the world right now
Five of the most alarming AI projects in the world right now
Publish Date: 2026-03-29 19:38:00
Source Domain: www.forbes.com.au
Published on
March 30, 2026
Opinion: At AI conferences, I spend a large portion of my time talking about the commercial and customer transformation of AI. But here’s what I don’t put on the slide.
Mark Zuckerberg at the Meta Connect developer conference wearing Meta glasses (Photo by Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images)
What keeps me up about AI in 2026 is not superintelligence. Not hallucinations. Not the absence of a regulatory framework, though that is its own disaster in slow motion. The projects I worry about most have already left the debate stage. They are infrastructure now; quietly, permanently and without anyone voting on them.
I call this the normalisation stack. Not one system. Not one company. A set of interlocking projects that, taken together, are reshaping war, identity, trust and political persuasion faster than any government, regulator or boardroom can respond. None of them require artificial general intelligence to be dangerous. They just need to ship.
Here are five that deserve your attention right now.
1. Anduril’s Autonomous Weapons Factory
Start here: in September 2025, Australia signed a A$1.7 billion contract with Anduril Industries for Ghost Shark; an extra-large autonomous undersea vehicles designed for intelligence, surveillance and strike operations.
Which makes what is happening in Ohio worth paying attention to.
Arsenal-1 — five million square feet across 500 acres in Pickaway County — began serial production of the YFQ-44A Fury unmanned combat aircraft in March 2026. The Fury is designed to fly alongside crewed fighters, making decisions at speeds no human can match. The Lattice software platform running underneath processes 2.4 terabytes of sensor data daily across 100-plus installations. The Roadrunner counter-drone system went from concept to combat-validated in under two years. A traditional…
