Caroline Hyde

Yeah, so on the flip side, they actually trimmed their Microsoft stake and their Amazon position.

This is really the frontier of the future of war.

This is everything that folks like stop killer robots and others have been warning about.

This is the Pentagon trying to experiment with completely new tech that has so far been failing.

It's experimental.

And this is a moment really where the AI companies are coming to the fore quite unexpectedly.

Elon Musk is the very same person who said that he would have nothing to do with new tools for killing back in 2015 when he signed on to an open letter from AI researchers and roboticists saying, we do not want autonomous weapons.

And now this is the Pentagon trying to create autonomous weapons.

These are weapons that can select and engage targets of their own accord.

The contest is not explicitly saying they will be doing that, but they are saying that drones will be

moving around and taking commands from voice and turning those into digital instructions.

I think there are four stages.

First is, as you say, there are drones.

Everyone's become familiar with drones because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

And Elon Musk himself said in 2024 that if there is a major power war, it's going to be a drone war.

So everyone is very focused on what that might look like in the case of a U.S.-China contest over Taiwan.

People have flown multiple drones together.

That's not the same as a swarm.

A swarm really is where the drones talk to each other

They interact with each other and ultimately potentially carry a payload or a weapon and can drop that weapon on a target.