Robert Reich: AutoWar The Nightmare – OpEd

Key Takeaways:

• The column says Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is tasking Elon Musk and Newt Gingrich to sketch an “Autonomous Warfare Command” (AutoWarCom) for drones, sensors, and unmanned boats, and proposes tripling autonomous-warfare spending to $74 billion.
• It names Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, a Trump donor, as an adviser, and treats lethal systems that select targets without a human decision as the core risk, citing reported control failures at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google.
• The author’s objection is political as well as technical: a separate command plus these advisers, not a claim that such a command already exists or that rogue weapons have been fielded.

Imagine four of the most frighteningly irresponsible people in America deciding how AI will be put to use in the most frighteningly irresponsible way.

Pete Hegseth is one of them. Trump is another. The other two are Elon Musk and Newt Gingrich.

Hegseth says he’s tasking Musk and Gingrich with laying the groundwork for a new “Autonomous Warfare Command,” or AutoWarCom — a new Pentagon command operation for autonomous warfare. It would feature unmanned drones, autonomous sensors, unmanned boats, and other autonomous systems. Hegseth is proposing to triple spending on autonomous warfare to $74 billion.

Hegseth has also named as an adviser Palmer Luckey, a major Trump donor who designed the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset credited with reviving the virtual reality industry, and co-founded Anduril Industries, a military tech company focused on autonomous drones and sensors.

The specter of autonomous lethal weapons — weapons that kill without human beings first deciding who, how, or when — is the nightmare of many who deal with AI. Autonomous AI weapons are fraught with unpredictability. And what happens when AI weapons escape their controls and go rogue, as recently occurred at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google?

Bad enough that Hegseth and Trump are pouring money into this. Worse that they’re setting up a separate military command for it. Worse still that they’re depending on Musk, Gingrich, and a virtual-reality game designer to tell them how.

I keep thinking I’ll wake up from this nightmare into a sane world.

• This article was published at Robert Reich’s Substack

About Robert Reich

Robert B. Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies, and writes at robertreich.substack.com. Reich served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written fifteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of Nations," and"Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent, "The Common Good," which is available in bookstores now. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, "Inequality For All." He's co-creator of the Netflix original documentary "Saving Capitalism," which is streaming now.

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