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AIGlobal AI Adoption Is Outpacing Risk Understanding, Warns MIT CSAIL
As organizations rush to implement artificial intelligence (AI), a new analysis of AI-related risks finds significant gaps in our understanding, highlighting an urgent need for a more comprehensive approach.
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AIThe Danger of AI in War: It Doesn’t Care About Self-Preservation
Recent wargames using artificial-intelligence models from OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic revealed a troubling trend: AI models are more likely than humans to escalate conflicts to kinetic, even nuclear, war.
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THE MILITARY & TERRORISMHow U.S. Military Planning Has Shifted Away from Fighting Terrorism to Readying for Tensions and Conflict with China and Russia
As changes emerge in the types of threats facing the U.S., the American military adjusts its strategic focus, budgets and planning. For instance, after 9/11, the U.S. military refocused away from its Cold War emphasis on preparing for combat against a powerful nation – the Soviet Union – and toward fighting small terrorist and insurgent groups instead. Over the past decade, the Pentagon’s efforts have shifted back to preparing for what officials call “great power competition” among the U.S., Russia and China.
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CHINA WATCHFloating Piers and Sinking Hopes: China’s Logistics Challenge in Invading Taiwan
Last month the United States disassembled and removed the floating pier it had assembled at a Gaza beach to take aid deliveries. It took almost a month to assemble, waves damaged it and almost destroyed it, and waves drove ashore boats that serviced it. And all that was nothing compared with the challenges that China’s armed forces would face in trying to deliver a mountain of personnel, equipment and supplies in an invasion of Taiwan.
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SPACE SECURITYSpace Militarization Could Pose a Challenge to Global Security
Typically, we would not be thinking of killer satellites, space nukes, and orbital debris fields that could lead to global collapse. But maybe we should. In May 2024, Russia launched a satellite that some observers believe is a weapon system that could allow the targeted destruction of other satellites in orbit.
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CHINA WATCHChina May Be Putting the Great Firewall into Orbit
The first satellites for China’s ambitious G60 mega-constellation are in orbit in preparation for offering global satellite internet services—and we should worry about how this will help Beijing export its model of digital authoritarianism around the world.
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AIArtificial Intelligence at War
The Gaza war has shown that the use of AI in tactical targeting can drive military strategy by encouraging decision-making bias. At the start of the conflict, an Israeli Defense Force AI system called Lavender apparently identified 37,000 people linked to Hamas. Its function quickly shifted from gathering long-term intelligence to rapidly identifying individual operatives to target.
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NUCLEAR WEAPONSA New U.S. Russia, China Nuclear Arms Race Spells Danger
Unlike in the Cold War, the United States faces the prospect in the next decade of two peer nuclear adversaries, which will together have twice as many strategic nuclear weapons as it does. While extended nuclear assurance and persuasion have been important factors in the US for a long time, there does not appear to be any widely accepted methodology for reaching a decision on how many weapons are needed for these purposes.
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KILLER ROBOTS‘Killer Robots’ Are Becoming a Real Threat in Africa
The use of drones in the Sahel, a region of Africa that has been plagued by violence driven by jihadist insurgency for much of the past decade, has become a real problem. But even more concerning is the fact that their AI-powered variants, which are known as lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS), have been deployed in Africa in recent years.
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CRITICAL MINERALSInsights on Valuable Byproduct Minerals
Byproduct minerals are not the main target of the mining operation but are obtained as a result of processing the primary ore. Many critical minerals are byproducts of mining other minerals like copper, gold, and zinc.
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DRONES DEFENSEEngineers Debut New Drone ID Tech After Yemen Strikes Israel
Tel Aviv University researchers unveil an AI-powered drone ID radar system that enhances detection in challenging urban environments.
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INDUSTRIAL RESPONSEResourcing the Ramp-Up: NATO and the Challenge of a Coherent Industrial Response to Russia's War in Ukraine
Near the top of the new NATO Secretary-General’s in-tray will be an urgent question: why are efforts to mobilize the alliance’s industrial base and ramp up production still yielding underwhelming results, over two years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine?
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CHINA WATCHTaiwan May Yet Become a Porcupine
It’s early days, but the signs are strong that Taiwan’s new government will insist on much more of a porcupine strategy for national defense than many officers in the country’s hidebound armed forces have been willing to accept.
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ARCTIC STRATEGYNew U.S. Arctic Strategy Focused on Russian, Chinese Inroads
The United States is looking to boost intelligence collection in the Arctic and enhance cooperation with allies in the region, to prevent Russia and China from exploiting the cold and icy northern region at America’s expense.
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CHEMICAL WEAPONSRussia Spreads Disinformation to Cover Up Its Use of Chemical Weapons in Ukraine
The United States determined Russia used the chemical weapon chloropicrin against Ukrainian troops and riot control agents (RCA) as a method of warfare in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).
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