We Used to Compile Our Own Wartime Kill Lists. Now We Let A.I. Do It.

War in the

Middle East

U.S.-Iran Talks

Israel-Lebanon Truce

Strait of Hormuz

Generals Running Iran

Timeline of War

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.

Supported by

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Nonfiction

We Used to Compile Our Own Wartime Kill Lists. Now We Let A.I. Do It.

In “Project Maven,” Katrina Manson shows us how close we are to artificial intelligence picking targets and dropping bombs without human input.

Share full article

Video

Credit

Credit...

By Jenny Volvovski

By

Fred Kaplan

Fred Kaplan, Slate’s War Stories columnist, is the author of “The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

April 28, 2026,

5:02 a.m. ET

Buy Book

▾

Amazon

Apple Books

Barnes & Noble

Books-A-Million

Bookshop.org

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

See more of our coverage in your search results.

Encuentra más de nuestra cobertura en los resultados de búsqueda.

Add The New York Times on Google

Agrega The New York Times en Google

PROJECT MAVEN: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare

, by Katrina Manson

Science-fiction authors have long fantasized about wars where machines aim the weapons and pull the triggers. In “Project Maven,” the Bloomberg News tech and national security reporter Katrina Manson claims the era of “killer robots” is here. The fusion of artificial intelligence and modern warfare raises, as she puts it, “the biggest moral and practical question there is: who — or what — gets to decide to take a human life? And who bears that cost?”

Yet that question has barely been mulled by the officers managing the new weapons or the politicians funding them. It’s a familiar syndrome in military history: New weapons technologies are perfected and rushed into the arsenal before their implications — for the future of not only war but humanity — are thought through.

Project Maven

Save to

your reading list

:

Want to read

Have read

How this happened with A.I. over the course of barely a decade, much of it secretly plotted by a handful of clever obsessives, is the story that Manson tells in “Project Maven,” which is also the name of the Pentagon’s main A.I. program.

The U.S. military hasn’t yet fired a weapon with

no

humans in the loop, but we are poised on the thin edge of that evolution. The Defense Department regulation on autonomous weapons requires only “appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force” — without specifying who defines “appropriate.” For many existing weapons, especially the latest drones, A.I. controls every stage from the launch

up to

the actual kill; it does so in a matter of seconds, and human troops trust the A.I. so fully that they pull the trigger

,

at the algorithm’s urging

,

with little hesitation.

Manson’s story — deeply researched and breezily written — begins when a Marine colonel named Drew Cukor was watching a 2017 documentary about an A.I. program that beat an 18-time Go champion in four out of five games. He realized that if A.I. was spreading everywhere, it would soon spread to the battlefield. Cukor knew China was adopting it. If the United States didn’t, he feared we might lose the next big war.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and

log into

your Times account, or

subscribe

for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?

Log in

.

Want all of The Times?

Subscribe

.

Related Content

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT