In announcing Project Meridian and a new Autonomous Warfare Command, War Secretary Pete Hegseth is inviting conflicts of interest.
Trump’s proposed budget hides $1 trillion in military spending from the public by spreading it across disparate government agencies.
Although the development of lethal autonomous weapons systems has accelerated over the last few years with the rise of ever more powerful AI models, these systems have not outgrown existing international humanitarian law. The question, as with international law in general, is whether the international community can enforce those laws. More specifically, whether autonomous weapons, along with other kinds of arms like chemical and biological weapons, fall under the so-called 1981 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. The United States ratified the CCW in 1995 and is therefore theoretically bound by it.