The AI War Brief

Army Robot Integrators, Ukraine's Amphibious UGV | Oct 05, 2026

The US Army has started training the people who decide how robots fight, while Ukraine shows what happens when electronic warfare, fuel strikes and ground robots are sequ

AutoWarCom: Pentagon's Four-Star Drone Command | Oct 02, 2026

The Pentagon declares autonomous warfare a permanent command, while the Navy and Ukraine race to field the machines. Secretary Hegseth announces AutoWarCom, a four-star

Pentagon's $4.15B Counter-Drone Buy, Just $50M Funded | Sep 30, 2026

The Pentagon just announced billions in counter-drone contracts, but almost none of the money is actually committed. Marcus and Sam break down the ten new indefinite-del

UN Finds War Crimes Grounds in Maven-Linked Strike | Sep 28, 2026

An AI-fed targeting pipeline carried a six-year-old database error into a strike that killed over 150 people — and this week a UN Fact-Finding Mission concluded there are

Navy Builds Robot Warfare Command, Lattice Goes Live | Sep 25, 2026

Nobody announced a new weapon this week — they announced structures, and that tells you where the real fight has moved. The U.S. Navy formally established the Robotic an

Royal Navy's Robot Submarine Fires First Torpedo | Sep 23, 2026

The last domain where uncrewed systems only watched just became a domain where they shoot. Marcus and Sam open on XV Excalibur, the Royal Navy's twelve-metre, nineteen-t

Scaleout's ALMA Drone Picks Its Own Kill | Sep 21, 2026

A NATO-backed drone ran an entire find-rank-strike chain on a live target with no human choosing what to hit — and it happened weeks before global diplomats finished wate

NATO Shoots Down a Drone Over Lithuania | Sep 18, 2026

NATO fighter jets just shot down an armed drone over alliance airspace for the first time this cycle — and it's not the only interceptor story breaking this week. On Sep

NATO Downs Drone Over Lithuania in First-Ever Intercept | Sep 16, 2026

NATO fighters shoot down a drone over Lithuanian airspace for the first time ever — and it's just one piece of a bigger shift toward mass-produced, attritable autonomous

Sargan 3000 Wins History's First Drone Naval Battle | Sep 14, 2026

Autonomous weapons just crossed a new threshold: machines built to hunt other machines, on the water, in the air, and on the gun line. This episode covers Ukraine's Sarg

The Pentagon Asked OpenAI for an AI That Rarely Says No | Sep 11, 2026

Leaked contract records reveal the Pentagon wanted a version of OpenAI's models built to refuse military commands as rarely as possible — and the same documents show why

LOCUST X3 and the Unverified Border Laser Claim | Sep 09, 2026

Directed energy weapons went operational this week — and the numbers being used to sell that story don't hold up to scrutiny. Marcus and Sam break down the Army's $464.8

K9 Meets Drone: Hanwha's Sixty-Second Kill Chain | Sep 07, 2026

This week the story isn't a new weapon, it's new plumbing between the ones that already exist, and it's compressing timelines across the board. Marcus and Sam open with

Army Buys LOCUST X3 Lasers; Ukraine's Jet Killers | Sep 04, 2026

The West spent this week trying to change the arithmetic of drone defence rather than the equipment. Marcus and Sam break down the US Army's first ever production contra

Geran-5 Jet Drones Outrun Ukraine's Interceptors | Sep 02, 2026

The cheap-interceptor era just hit a physics problem it cannot buy its way out of. Russia's jet-powered Geran-5 drones now reach up to 600 km/h at ranges near 950 km, an

Judge Blocks Pentagon's Anthropic Ban, Clears Maven | Aug 31, 2026

A federal judge just tore up the Pentagon's ban on Anthropic, clearing Palantir's Claude-powered Maven targeting system to become a permanent program of record by end of

Marines Vow Humans Stay in the Loop as Autonomy Ships | Aug 28, 2026

Four days after a Russian drone chose its own target in Zaporizhzhia, the Marine Corps put the opposite promise in writing — and a professor at its own war college had al

A Russian Drone Chose Its Own Target — Zaporizhzhia | Aug 26, 2026

The human has been removed from the last decision, and it happened on hardware you can order online. Marcus and Sam open on the New York Times forensic investigation pub

Project Griffin's Kill Switch, Yuma Laser Shoot-Off | Aug 24, 2026

When an institution starts designing brakes into its weapons, that tells you more than any capability demo. Marcus and Sam break down the Army's newly public Project Gri

Ukraine's Alexa Interceptor, Army's Hunting AI Agents | Aug 22, 2026

The boundary lines of modern defence are moving — who owns the design, who owns the risk, who owns the decision. Marines on Okinawa printed replacement truck parts durin