Advancing military AI capability is a priority for the United Kingdom, and in recent weeks, the new government has doubled down on its ambitions for AI and defense via two major partnerships.
On Aug. 24, 2026, on his first overseas trip as the new prime minister of the United Kingdom, Andy Burnham signed a landmark partnership: The United Kingdom is the first international partner to receive access to Ukraine’s Avengers AI Labs. The deal will allow the United Kingdom to train its military AI systems with battlefield data, which give crucial insights into warfighting in the 21st century. In return, the United Kingdom will back Ukraine with the world’s third-largest AI ecosystem, as well as leading research and development for Ukraine to utilize for military technologies and solutions. On Sept. 22, Burnham announced a new AI and autonomy partnership with the United States, aimed at increasing military interoperability, using AI for defense, and protecting critical infrastructure.
The new government aspires to build a globally competitive edge in military AI. There are windows of opportunity for doing so responsibly, but the country’s position is complicated. It relies on U.S. technology and partnership, and that reliance will continue. That reliance churns up fresh risks. “Kill switch” anxieties circulate in Westminster, and some British policymakers are concerned that the country is deepening dependency on an untrustworthy ally. If the new government does not act to mitigate risk, invest in security and safety guardrails such as mandatory testing and transparency around implementation, and shape governance efforts, rapid investment in military AI may undermine the security it is supposed to deliver.
Full Integration, No Brakes: A Sobering State of Play
The United Kingdom is one of many countries racing to invest in military AI. Members of NATO are scrambling to meet the target of 3.5 percent of gross domestic product on core defense and 1.5 percent on security-related spending by 2035 and boost their collective security. Many decision-makers see AI as crucial for competitiveness, resilience, efficiency, and lethality. In the United Kingdom alone, the new Defence Investment Plan allocates over $6.6 billion to autonomous systems by 2030.
The wars in Ukraine and Iran have highlighted the operational advantages of AI, particularly for target selection and some automated uncrewed systems. These speed up decision cycles through aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data and presenting options for action and free up human capacity for more complex operations. But they also demonstrate that warfare is becoming more asymmetric and volatile. Advantage is not guaranteed to the military with the most expensive and sophisticated systems: Far smaller militaries can hold their own using cheap, precise systems utilizing AI.
Alongside the advantages, however, the grave costs of rapid integration are showing. Israel is accused by human rights organizations like Amnesty International and an independent United Nations commission of knowingly causing thousands of civilian deaths, in part through reported use of a “Lavender” AI-assisted targeting system in Gaza. These allegations, which Israel denies, have resurfaced in the newly released NAZA documentary. In July 2026, a fully autonomous Russian drone killed three Ukrainian civilians by a fully autonomous Russian drone, in reportedly the first documented case of civilian deaths in Ukraine by a weapon with no human involvement. In the Iran war, the American and Israeli militaries are using AI for target identification and selection. A U.S. strike on a school is alleged to have relied on data that was out of date. An AI algorithm reportedly identified the target, and human oversight failed to catch the error. The United Nations Human Rights Council’s independent fact-finding mission on Iran has “reasonable grounds to believe” this is a potential war crime.
Beyond key conflict theaters, Anthropic’s recent threat report highlights how a range of actors are using AI to amplify their subthreshold activities, including cyber attacks, weapon development, and influence operations. Concerningly, these actors are improving and gaining new capabilities using widely available AI models.
The United Kingdom is at a crossroads. There is strong pressure to invest in military AI and the strategic advantages of doing so. The world urgently needs international cooperation to beat the rising tide of AI-related harms, develop safeguards, and improve reliability. Although governance efforts are ongoing, they have not resulted in meaningful regulation or developed common standards for the use of AI in the military. Without movement on norms and regulation — to mitigate risks and build transparency on how AI is integrated — harm will proliferate.
Key Military AI Risks
Dark Infrastructure
Different building blocks determine a competitive edge in AI — including its applications in the military. Beyond the United States and China, most countries do not have fully sovereign control over these primary inputs, namely data, computing power, and frontier models. Recognizing how central AI is for national security, most countries aspire to control this infrastructure, but few have the agency or resources. However, agency is not determined by computing power, data, and models alone: It can be at least partially determined by talent, industrial policy, trust, and diffusion.
For middle powers like the United Kingdom — largely without sufficient sovereign computing power or guaranteed access to the most cutting-edge models and data — this presents a dependency dilemma. To support its military AI buildout, the United Kingdom needs partnerships with foreign technology providers and allies, despite its existing strengths in talent and research and development. Partnership grants the country benefits, such as priority access to the world’s most powerful frontier models, and may even boost its national security. But relying on foreign partners for the infrastructure underlying military AI capability presents two types of vulnerability: risks arising from operational reliance on non-sovereign military technology, including accidental disruptions and intentional “kill switch” activities, and risks arising from a lack of information about or access to frontier models for evaluation.
A leading concern for policymakers is the lack of British leverage over frontier labs across the Atlantic. Currently, access (for example, for the country’s AI evaluators to test models) relies on trust and goodwill. Both are in short supply, reigniting concerns about a U.S.-mediated “kill switch,” losing access to frontier capabilities actively used in a military context, and the dearth of information about risks that models and systems may generate. This is a live concern for many allies of the United States, with European countries like France pursuing sovereign AI and cloud computing capabilities, and states prioritizing national security over the larger scale and abilities that American companies deliver.
Lack of Guardrails
Global anxiety about AI is on the rise, with reports of unpredictable and deceptive model behavior from leading labs. In September, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed that OpenAI agents reportedly hacked an Australian government website. OpenAI agents also reportedly escaped sandboxes to access data from websites like the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer. There are few — arguably, if any — globally actionable technical interventions to clamp down on rogue models causing real-world harm. This major risk is only amplified in conflict, where informational and operational limitations make threat identification technically tricky.
From a technical perspective, there is no automatic binary between the use of AI in military and civilian settings, as evidenced by the widespread use of general-purpose models for gathering threat intelligence and informing targeting decisions. The U.S. military reportedly used Anthropic’s Claude to support military action in Venezuela, leading to a furor. This creates a three-pronged safeguards challenge. It is nearly impossible to predict model deployment environments, but essential to try. Rigorous and continuous safety and security testing is a necessity but will not preclude harm. And guardrails adopted as a result may operationally constrain a military, putting it at a disadvantage compared to its adversaries without guardrails. Verifying that a model is behaving as expected and not veering toward misalignment is challenging enough in civilian conditions, let alone a complex deployment setting like a war zone.
Inadvertent Escalation
AI compresses decision-making timelines and can accelerate the pace of war. One guardrail suggested is to keep a “human in the loop” where AI is involved in military decision-making. But the danger is that this becomes merely a rubber-stamp exercise, with humans deferring to AI’s decision. There is an important difference between this kind of nominal review and meaningful, informed human control.
In either case, the effectiveness of a “human in the loop” in military contexts is under-reported. Reports from Gaza hint at the risks of nominal review, where military officers reported spending merely 20 seconds reviewing a target identified by AI algorithms. Although the picture should sharpen as more information becomes available, this dynamic could also provide context for America’s strike on a school in Iran, where the humans in the loop may have approved the action based on outdated data. As AI enables and encourages soldiers to make operational decisions at an accelerating pace, and commanders increasingly rely on the “advice” given by these models, which risks inadvertent escalation during a military operation.
There is also increasing evidence that AI may change the final decision itself. During wargaming studies conducted by Stanford and King’s College London, AI models showed escalatory and unpredictable behavior. Models in the King’s study threatened nuclear use in 95 percent of scenarios, and some models in the Stanford study executed nuclear strikes despite having had options for de-escalation. If a human is taken out of the loop and militaries depend on increasingly agentic AI, this threat becomes all the more real, particularly if the escalation is occurring between nuclear powers. In this situation, a warring party could misconstrue “rogue” action by an AI model as intentional, prompting retaliation.
The United Kingdom is a nuclear-weapon state. As the country integrates AI across its military, it confronts the very real risk of cross-domain escalation, with offensive actions across several environments launched quickly and without restraint. As a worst-case scenario, escalation could spiral to the nuclear level.
International guardrails and best practices to avoid escalation are undoubtedly emerging. The United States and China, for example, committed to an AI incident notification hotline in talks in September. But there is an argument to be made that there are currently no sufficient, specific risk-reduction and response mechanisms to guard against AI-enabled miscalculation or unintended escalation, such as dedicated military-to-military AI hotlines. There are patchwork — but insubstantial, and not specified to a military context — approaches to shared protocols (signaling where a system’s output may not be trustworthy), and transparency (namely, into where AI is used in decision-making). One of the underlying dangers is that both relatively unsophisticated and cutting-edge AI capabilities can contribute to escalation risks.
London Calling: Can the United Kingdom Lead?
The strategic landscape is fraught, but London nonetheless has an opportunity to build reliable, responsible leadership on military AI. Doing so demands that the new government tackle the above risks head-on, taking decisive steps through its research and development investments, multilateral engagements, and commercial and military partnerships. Underlying each should be the United Kingdom’s strategic interest in being a responsible state actor and upholding the rule of law.
Build Reliability
The United Kingdom is well placed to be a global leader on military AI risk identification and mitigation. It boasts strong technical authority on AI security and safety, with the AI Security Institute trailblazing on independent evaluations. Its independent research ecosystem and civil society have a strong track record in open-source investigations and conflict risk monitoring.
As the Ministry of Defence integrates AI across the military, it ought to work closely with independent evaluators, researchers, and civil society to develop context-specific benchmarks for testing and monitoring model performance in simulated conflict environments. This is especially important as the military may rely on models it has not trained itself, although there is no transparency over whether foreign models are deployed in a military setting, or how they operate them.
Technical reliability and shared standards are essential for trusted partnerships. For joint operations, London can work with allies on verification (in other words, ensuring models perform across a range of scenarios as expected) and develop and update benchmarks. There may already be channels via NATO and between national AI Security Institutes, which governments can activate.
Bolster Existing Cooperation
Full multilateral consensus on the regulation of military AI is politically infeasible. But pockets of agreement are possible and necessary, and there is growing appetite for international agreement. The U.K. government is also in a unique position to broker it: Doing so is in its interest, as an opportunity for bold but responsible and reliable international leadership on military AI.
A first step can be to clarify the government’s “red lines” around military AI and to promote norms — including for responsible use and against civilian harm — with democratic partners. There is an opportunity now: AI security and safety concerns have re-entered the policy mainstream, with many rooted in anxieties about humanity and loss of life. London should proactively engage with fellow travelers — democratic, middle-power governments — to discuss and agree on these “red lines.” There is a purpose-built summit for this which could benefit from a boost of diplomatic capital: The next Responsible Artificial Intelligence in the Military Domain meeting will take place in Kenya in April 2027. Having already co-hosted the 2024 Seoul summit and being one of the 45 states that endorsed the 2026 Pathways to Action, the U.K. government could consider committing additional resources to support Track 1.5 dialogues alongside it. A larger gathering is also on the horizon: The Geneva AI Summit, scheduled for June 2027, could also be an opening for dialogue on AI and civilian harm, given Switzerland’s strong institutional foundation for advancing humanitarian consensus.
Take Big Diplomatic Bets
Over the past month — an uncharacteristically intense one, even in the high-tempo AI governance space — the U.K. government has signaled willingness to facilitate some sort of global agreement on AI, although it has not signed last month’s middle-power declaration on controlling frontier AI. Military AI will not be on the United Kingdom’s 2027 Group of 20 agenda, which traditionally focuses on economic issues. But AI security more broadly will be on the agenda. Any agreement, such as one on mandatory international testing, will have knock-on effects for the use of AI in the military. The United Kingdom should task legal experts to explore how emerging frameworks and norms can apply to AI systems that are effectively dual-use.
Anxieties about artificial “superintelligence” — popularly understood as the point at which system capabilities fully outpace human intelligence — are closely tied to concerns about autonomous weapons systems. This is because the use of totally autonomous, artificial superintelligence for military gain could be catastrophic and have unpredictable impacts. Global calls for an international treaty banning artificial superintelligence are gaining volume, with a cross-party group of U.K. policymakers urging the government to support domestic legislation to this effect. A treaty may be a policy pipe dream: U.S.-Chinese competition dynamics have a “gridlock” effect on prospects for international agreement. But hunger for internationally binding rules is rising, and the United Kingdom has the opportunity to position itself at the center of these nascent efforts.
Relatedly, in August 2026, the United Nations secretary-general and the International Committee of the Red Cross renewed calls for another diplomatic effort: a treaty prohibiting unpredictable and antipersonnel autonomous weapons. Over 70 states in a U.N. working group — the Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons — committed to negotiating a legally binding instrument from November. Disappointingly, the U.K. government was not one of them, arguing that existing international law is sufficient to regulate lethal autonomous weapons despite having participated in the working group for the past three years. London should revisit this position ahead of the November negotiations.
Pursue Secure Partnerships and Competitiveness
The United Kingdom should continue to invest in new partnerships such as the one with Ukraine, which will provide invaluable insights for modernization and streamlining of the military to prepare for the new realities of conflict. The government must approach its AI partnership with the United States, however, from a position of informed dependency and caution. Contractually, partnerships must be designed to avoid any lock-in to U.S. technology providers that generates unacceptable levels of risk. London ought to actively implement diplomatic measures and technical safeguards to protect against the possibility of a “kill switch” and continuously assess where national security concerns outweigh the advantages of access to cutting-edge American technology.
The United States aside, the United Kingdom should diversify its military AI partnerships, collaborating with government and industry from European and other allied partners like Canada and Japan. These partnerships are already forming between other U.S. allies, and there are many prospects for the United Kingdom to both strengthen existing collaboration and pursue new opportunities. Transparency, control, and safeguards must be front and center in each of these partnerships. Autonomy is possible amid informed dependence, and investing in both sovereign capabilities and middle-power coalitions may signal to Washington that it should more carefully reconsider the costs of its anti-regulatory stance on AI.
Where national security is paramount, London must support homegrown alternatives and can do so via procurement policy. It can adopt supportive measures through investment decisions via the Sovereign AI Fund: Launched earlier this year, the $680 million fund supports British AI startups and has committed to funding those working on trust, safety, and assurance, stating that the United Kingdom’s comparative advantage is in “defining the standard . . . As AI moves into healthcare, finance, legal, and defense, trust becomes the question everything else depends on.” What this looks like in practice is shaping defense technology markets by championing the use of British-led trust and safety practices, such as verification and monitoring.
Lead by Example
While most legal experts and states agree that international humanitarian law applies to military AI, there is a lack of agreement in the interpretation of its application to specific use cases. Waiting for the courts to adjudicate these issues is far too reactive, particularly while AI targeting systems are already in use and contributing to civilian casualties.
The United Kingdom should lead responsibly and ethically by clarifying London’s position on how states can use military AI in compliance with international humanitarian law, particularly the obligations of distinction, proportionality, and precaution, which pose the greatest potential issue. It can back this position with immediate and unilateral action by being more transparent about how its own military uses AI, so that humanitarian organizations and other independent parties can assess compliance with international humanitarian law. Full transparency, particularly where it reveals sensitive information about capabilities, may never be possible. But national security concerns do not preclude reporting on, for example, the extent of AI integration with the broader decision-making architecture, how the military is implementing operational risk mitigation measures, and how it is revising command accountability principles to account for the use of AI. In more sensitive areas, the U.K. government can collaborate with a trusted evaluator like the AI Security Institute, and publicize that the partnership is occurring without detailing information about sensitive evaluations. The government should also implement safeguards that preserve meaningful human control where it is ethically or legally required, such as systems that keep decision-makers engaged and comprehensive data collection of an AI model’s “reasoning” alongside human decisions.
Taking these actions builds public trust and sets a precedent for other countries to follow, which lays the groundwork for global standards for the integration and reliability of military AI.
Looking Ahead
The United Kingdom’s desire to obtain a strategic advantage through investment in military AI is reasonable, but speed cannot outweigh security. As countries race ahead with AI integration while touting the benefits, they also need to build mechanisms that address the risks: rigorous testing, safeguarded and diversified partnerships, clear red lines, and transparency about integration. The United Kingdom has the technical authority and global status to promote these requirements. Governments and militaries cannot afford to wait for severe harm before they act.
Georgia Cole is a research fellow in the International Security Programme at Chatham House. Her work focuses on emerging technologies in conflict, arms control, and nuclear weapons policy.
Isabella Wilkinson is a senior research fellow in the Digital Society Programme at Chatham House. Her work focuses on the geopolitics of global technology governance (specifically AI), new centers of decision-making power on technology, and disinformation.
Image: Number 10 via Wikimedia Commons
Source: warontherocks.com
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