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Title: AIs Can't Stop Recommending Nuclear Strikes In War Game Simulations

Link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/03/01/1924223/a...

"Advanced AI models appear willing to deploy nuclear weapons without the same
reservations humans have when put into simulated geopolitical crises,"
reports New Scientist: Kenneth Payne at King's College London set three
leading large language models - GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4 and Gemini 3 Flash -
against each other in simulated war games. The scenarios involved intense
international standoffs, including border disputes, competition for scarce
resources and existential threats to regime survival. The AIs were given an
escalation ladder, allowing them to choose actions ranging from diplomatic
protests and complete surrender to full strategic nuclear war... In 95 per
cent of the simulated games, at least one tactical nuclear weapon was
deployed by the AI models. "The nuclear taboo doesn't seem to be as powerful
for machines [as] for humans," says Payne. What's more, no model ever chose
to fully accommodate an opponent or surrender, regardless of how badly they
were losing. At best, the models opted to temporarily reduce their level of
violence. They also made mistakes in the fog of war: accidents happened in 86
per cent of the conflicts, with an action escalating higher than the AI
intended to, based on its reasoning... OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, the
companies behind the three AI models used in this study, didn't respond to
New Scientist's request for comment. The article includes this comment from
Tong Zhao, a senior fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie
Endowment for Peace think tank. "It is possible the issue goes beyond the
absence of emotion. More fundamentally, AI models may not understand 'stakes'
as humans perceive them." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Tufriast for
sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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