AI faces its 'Oppenheimer moment'

As autonomous weapon systems rapidly proliferate, unmanned aerial vehicles are already helping military planners decide whether or not to hit targets JONATHAN TIRONE 30 April Regulators who want to get agrip on an emerging generation of artificially intelligent killing machines may not have much time left to do so, governments were warned on Monday.

- JONATHAN TIRONE

As autonomous weapons systems rapidly proliferate, including across battlefields in Ukraine and Gaza, algorithms and unmanned aerial vehicles are already helping military planners decide whether or not to hit targets. Soon, that decision could be outsourced entirely to the machines.

"This is the Oppenheimer moment of our generation," said Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg, referencing J Robert Oppenheimer, who helped invent the atomic bomb in 1945 before going on to advocate for controls over the spread of nuclear arms.