US Army Developing AI-Powered Autonomous Weapons

A new initiative by the US Army suggests “another significant step towards lethal autonomous weapons,” warns a leading artificial-intelligence researcher who has called for a ban on so-called “killer robots.”

The Army Contracting Command has called on potential vendors in industry and academia to submit ideas to help build its Advanced Targeting and Lethality Automated System (ATLAS), which a Defense Department solicitation says will use artificial intelligence and machine learning to give ground-combat vehicles autonomous targeting capabilities. This will allow weapons to “acquire, identify, and engage targets at least 3X faster than the current manual process,” according to the notice.

Read the full article and more in Quartz.