The US and some its allies just pulled off a milestone first by letting AI target enemies like it would in a war

• The US, UK, and Australia let AI detect and target enemies in a real-time simulated battle environment.
• The ground-breaking exercise is the first time AI was tested in this way, per the British military.

The US and its allies employed artificial intelligence systems to target enemies in a real-time, simulated battle environment for the first time.

The exercise marks a major moment in the AI race that's pushing the US, its allies, and adversaries to develop and deploy autonomous capabilities at a breakneck pace.

The trial was conducted as part of the larger AUKUS Resilient and Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Technologies event hosted by the US Army during the multinational Project Convergence exercise earlier this year. During the trial, Australia, the UK, and the US tested the abilities of AI-enabled unmanned aerial vehicles to locate and destroy ground targets.

The "ground-breaking exercise," according to the UK's Defense Science and Technology Laboratory, was "the first use of autonomy and AI sensing systems in a real-time military environment," meaning the timescales used would apply in an actual conflict situation.

During the event, the use of AI reduced the time needed to identify targets while reducing risk to human lives, the lab added.

Other AI trials have involved military personnel from Australia, the UK, and the US testing "cutting edge autonomous and AI-enabled sensing capabilities in a multi-domain battlespace — land, maritime, air and cyber — that minimize the time between sensing enemy targets, deciding how to respond, and responding to the threat," the US Department of Defense said last Friday.

The process, including the use of the drones and the data shared from the training, was collaborative between all three AUKUS nations.

A video shared by the Office of the Secretary of Defense Public Affairs highlighted some details of the trials, including how Australia, the UK, and the US worked together on aligning their artificial intelligence systems to work together.

The successful milestone exercise was built on experimental work carried out by AUKUS members in 2023, during which the three nations explored how AI systems could detect and track military targets and retrained UAVs during flights to adapt to different missions.

The US military, like others, has been focused on the development and deployment of AI systems. Going hand-in-hand with the adoption of AI across the US military service branches, the Pentagon's major Replicator Initiative, revealed last fall, is also focused on fielding autonomous systems rapidly and at scale across various war fighting domains to compete with rivals like China able to leverage mass in a combat environment.

Drones, in particular, are a notable focus area, specifically ones featuring AI-enabled capabilities for gathering data and targeting enemies. Per DoD, the target sensing systems used in this most recent trial "will yield more reliable data that commanders can use to make optimal decisions and service members to act more quickly against kinetic threats."

While there are clear advantages to allowing artificial intelligence to play a role in target acquisition, there are also concerns about this within the larger debate about the role of autonomous systems in future warfare.

In April, an investigation revealed the Israeli Defense Force had let an AI program take the lead on targeting thousands of Hamas operatives in the early days of Israel's war in Gaza, highlighting concerns that future warfare experts and human rights activists have long held. The IDF denied some of the claims about the program, but it has acknowledged the use of certain artificial intelligence systems in the conflict.

In previous discussions around how AI will be used in military applications, top US defense officials have made clear that humans will remain in the loop of autonomous decisions, but there are questions about whether that structure will be feasible as AI continues to develop.

In November last year, the Pentagon released a strategy on how it planned to accelerate the adoption of AI across the various service branches, noting its focus on how autonomous systems would expedite gathering information and making real-time decisions.