November 03, 2026
Mitigating the Risks of AI Integration Into Nuclear Weapons Operations
This article was originally published in Arms Control Association.
If you take away one message from my brief remarks today, I hope it is this: The most consequential AI risks to nuclear operations may not come from giving AI direct authority over nuclear weapons. They may instead arise from AI influencing, distorting, or corrupting the information environment; accelerating decision cycles; shaping what commanders believe to be true; narrowing or expanding the options they consider and increasingly, with agentic AI, taking actions in the world on our behalf.
If we move down this path too quickly, we risk learning the hard way that it is much easier to tell an agentic system what we want it to accomplish than to specify everything we do not want it to do in pursuit of that objective.
My concern was—and remains—that they can obscure a much more complicated set of interactions within the nuclear enterprise and, just as importantly, outside it. Those interactions are not well understood today, and they will become even more difficult to untangle as AI capabilities advance and diffuse across all-domain military operations.
Read the full article in Arms Control Association.
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