Autonomous weapons will be ‘key and essential part’ of warfare, Joint Chiefs chair says

NASHVILLE — Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine said Thursday that autonomous weapons are going to be a “key and essential part of everything we do” when asked about how such tools would fit into the future of warfare.

Speaking during a fireside chat at Vanderbilt University’s Asness Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats, Caine said “we are doing a lot of thinking about this in the joint force right now” on how autonomous tech would be applied to areas like drones and command-and-control operations.

His remarks signal that the U.S. military is keen on crafting plans to further adopt artificial intelligence tools and other evolving technologies that would automate national security decisions made in the Defense Department.

“Probably everybody in this room uses some flavor of a [large language model] every single day,” he said, adding the same can’t be said for staff in the halls of the Pentagon. “So, we have to really normalize this and become early adopters.”

The remarks come as observers weigh tensions between the Pentagon and Anthropic, which recently unveiled a powerful frontier AI model, Mythos Preview, that was held back from public release over cybersecurity risks, paired with a new initiative to study its effects on global networks. 

Intelligence community units have expressed interest in Mythos, Nextgov/FCW previously reported. The NSA, a component of the DOD, has been granted access to it, Axios reported Sunday.

Earlier this year, Anthropic declined to ease restrictions against its tools being used for domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons for Pentagon use, triggering a “supply chain risk” designation from the Defense Department and a White House order that all federal agencies phase out their uses of Anthropic tools. 

The company has legally challenged the move, and a federal judge issued a temporary injunction on the designation and ban in late March. The government has said it intends to appeal the injunction. 

This week, President Donald Trump said in a CNBC interview that the company is “shaping up” and can “be of great use” in the future, a sign that tensions between Anthropic and the government may be easing up. 

The use of AI in military operations often draws scrutiny because it can speed up battlefield decisions while blurring human accountability, and it can raise doubts about whether such systems would reliably comply with the laws of war. Lawmakers have asked the Pentagon if AI systems were used in a deadly strike on a school in Iran that occurred in the opening hours of the U.S.-Israel war against Tehran.

Caine also said U.S. government agencies need to be “better buyers” for the private sector. “We have to write better contracts,” he said, elaborating that current acquisition frameworks are slowing contract workflows.

Contracts should be structured so risk is shared between buyers and sellers with the goal of bringing better outcomes for servicemembers, he added.