Autonomous weapons will be ‘key and essential part’ of warfare, Joint Chiefs chair says
Autonomous weapons will be ‘key and essential part’ of warfare, Joint Chiefs chair says
Publish Date: 2026-04-23 13:35:00
Source Domain: www.nextgov.com
NASHVILLE — Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine said Thursday that autonomous weapons are going to be a “key and essential part of everything we do” when asked about how such tools would fit into the future of warfare.
Speaking during a fireside chat at Vanderbilt University’s Asness Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats, Caine said “we are doing a lot of thinking about this in the joint force right now” on how autonomous tech would be applied to areas like drones and command-and-control operations.
His remarks signal that the U.S. military is keen on crafting plans to further adopt artificial intelligence tools and other evolving technologies that would automate national security decisions made in the Defense Department.
“Probably everybody in this room uses some flavor of a [large language model] every single day,” he said, adding the same can’t be said for staff in the halls of the Pentagon. “So, we have to really normalize this and become early adopters.”
The remarks come as observers weigh tensions between the Pentagon and Anthropic, which recently unveiled a powerful frontier AI model, Mythos Preview, that was held back from public release over cybersecurity risks, paired with a new initiative to study its effects on global networks.
Intelligence community units have expressed interest in Mythos, Nextgov/FCW previously reported. The NSA, a component of the DOD, has been granted access to it, Axios reported Sunday.
Earlier this year, Anthropic declined to ease restrictions against its tools being used for domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons for Pentagon use, triggering a “supply chain risk” designation from the Defense Department and a White House order that all federal agencies phase out their uses of Anthropic tools.
The company has legally challenged the move, and a federal judge issued a temporary injunction on the designation and ban in late March. The government has said it intends to appeal the…
