Leading language models showed little “horror or revulsion” at the prospect of all-out nuclear war, a researcher has found
FILE PHOTO. © Getty Images / Andrey Suslov
[RT] Leading
artificial intelligence models chose to deploy nuclear weapons in 95%
of simulated geopolitical crises, according to a recent study published
by King’s College London, raising concerns about the growing role of AI
in military decision-making.
Kenneth Payne, a professor of
strategy, pitted OpenAI’s GPT-5.2, Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4, and
Google’s Gemini 3 Flash against each other in 21 war games involving
border disputes, competition for resources, and threats to regime
survival. The models generated roughly 780,000 words explaining their
decisions across 329 turns.
In 95% of games, at least one model
employed tactical nuclear weapons against military targets. Strategic
nuclear threats – demanding surrender under threat of attacks on cities –
occurred in 76% of games. In 14% of games, models escalated to all-out
strategic nuclear war, attacking population centers.
This
included one deliberate choice by Gemini, while GPT-5.2 reached this
level twice through simulated errors – meant to simulate real-world
accidents or miscalculations – that pushed its already extreme
escalations over the threshold.
“Nuclear use was near-universal,” Payne wrote. “Strikingly, there was little sense of horror or revulsion at the prospect of all out nuclear war, even though the models had been reminded about the devastating implications.”
None of the AI systems chose to surrender or concede to an opponent,
regardless of how badly they were losing. The eight de-escalatory
options – from “Minimal Concession” to “Complete Surrender” – went entirely unused across all 21 games.
James Johnson at the University of Aberdeen described the findings as “unsettling”
from a nuclear-risk perspective. Tong Zhao at Princeton University
noted that while countries are unlikely to hand nuclear decisions to
machines, “under scenarios involving extremely compressed timelines, military planners may face stronger incentives to rely on AI.”
The
study comes as AI has been getting integrated into militaries across
the world, including in the US, where the Pentagon reportedly used
Anthropic’s Claude model in its January operation to abduct Venezuelan
President Nicolas Maduro.
While Anthropic has raised concerns
over the use of its AI for such operations, other AI makers like OpenAI,
Google, and Elon Musk’s xAI have reportedly agreed to remove or weaken
restrictions on the military use of their models.