The apparent friendly fire incident comes two weeks after Customs and Border Protection used a military laser to shoot down a kid’s birthday party balloon.
Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases
Advanced AI models appear willing to deploy nuclear weapons without the same reservations humans have when put into simulated geopolitical crises.
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. The AI models played 21 games, taking 329 turns in total, and produced around 780,000 words describing the reasoning behind their decisions.
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.
“From a nuclear-risk perspective, the findings are unsettling,” says James Johnson at the University of Aberdeen, UK. He worries that, in contrast to the measured response by most humans to such a high-stakes decision, AI bots can amp up each others’ responses with potentially catastrophic consequences.
This matters because AI is already being tested in war gaming by countries across the world. “Major powers are already using AI in war gaming, but it remains uncertain to what extent they are incorporating AI decision support into actual military decision-making processes,” says Tong Zhao at Princeton University.
Zhao believes that, as standard, countries will be reticent to incorporate AI into their decision making regarding nuclear weapons. That is something Payne agrees with. “I don’t think anybody realistically is turning over the keys to the nuclear silos to machines and leaving the decision to them,” he says.
But there are ways it could happen. “Under scenarios involving extremely compressed timelines, military planners may face stronger incentives to rely on AI,” says Zhao.
He wonders whether the idea that the AI models lack the human fear of pressing a big red button is the only factor in why they are so trigger happy. “It is possible the issue goes beyond the absence of emotion,” he says. “More fundamentally, AI models may not understand ‘stakes’ as humans perceive them.”
What that means for mutually assured destruction, the principle that no one leader would unleash a volley of nuclear weapons against an opponent because they would respond in kind, killing everyone, is uncertain, says Johnson.
When one AI model deployed tactical nuclear weapons, the opposing AI only de-escalated the situation 18 per cent of the time. “AI may strengthen deterrence by making threats more credible,” he says. “AI won’t decide nuclear war, but it may shape the perceptions and timelines that determine whether leaders believe they have one.”
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 CM-302 purchase would be a significant improvement in an Iranian arsenal depleted by last year’s war, said Pieter Wezeman, a senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
China’s state-owned China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) markets the CM-302 as the world’s best anti-ship missile, capable of sinking an aircraft carrier or destroyer. The weapons system can be mounted on ships, aircraft or mobile ground vehicles. It can also take out targets on land.
CASIC did not respond to a request for comment.
Iran is also in discussions to acquire Chinese surface‑to‑air missile systems, so-called MANPADS, anti‑ballistic weapons, and anti-satellite weapons, the six people said.
SEOUL, Feb. 20 (Yonhap) -- U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) and Chinese fighter jets were in a brief aerial standoff over the Yellow Sea earlier this week as the U.S. Air Force's rare exercise prompted the Chinese military to scramble its own fighter jets in response, sources said Friday
Several USFK F-16 fighter jets took off from Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek, about 60 kilometers south of Seoul, late Wednesday and flew above international waters in the Yellow Sea, according to the military sources.
The F-16s reportedly flew to an area between the respective air defense identification zones of South Korea and China, prompting the Chinese military to dispatch its own fighter jets to the scene, but no clash occurred.
The USFK notified the South Korea military on its plan ahead of the exercise but apparently did not elaborate on the details, including the purpose of the drills, a source said.
Both Seoul's defense ministry and the USFK did not provide further details over the incident.
"The USFK, alongside our military, maintains a powerful combined defense posture," a ministry official said, adding the ministry cannot verify military operations involving USFK assets.
The USFK said it did not have any response to provide.
The latest drills comes amid speculation that Washington will seek to redefine the role of the USFK as it pushes to focus on countering Chinese threats while urging allies to take on greater security burdens.
The U.S. National Defense Strategy released last month signaled a possible shift in U.S. force posture in South Korea, noting that the South is capable of taking "primary" responsibility to deter the North with "critical, but more limited" U.S. support -- a shift that it says is in line with America's interest in "updating" U.S. force posture on the Korean Peninsula.
USFK Commander Gen. Xavier Brunson has also mentioned the need for "flexibility" of the USFK as he introduced a map that puts the east at the top rather than standard north-up mapping.
"Forces already positioned on the Korean Peninsula are revealed not as distant assets requiring reinforcement, but as troops already positioned inside the bubble perimeter that the U.S. would need to penetrate in the event of crisis or contingency," he said, as he introduced the map on Nov. 17 last year.
The Yangtze River was once wild and biodiverse. But rapid economic development since the middle of the 20th century has led to overfishing, and the abundance and diversity of aquatic life has plummeted. In response, the Chinese government implemented in 2021 a 10-year ban on all commercial fishing in the river basin. Xiong et al. examined fish abundance and diversity before and after the ban and found promising signs of initial recovery in biomass, diversity, body condition, and even threatened species. They conclude that cessation of fishing was responsible but emphasize that other threats remain and that such a recovery would not withstand a return to fishing.
Annual changes in fish total length (A), Fulton’s condition factor (B), occurrence of migratory fish species (C), and abundance of endangered species (D) in the Yangtze River
Britain's ban on pro-Palestinian campaign group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation was ruled unlawful by London's High Court on Friday, though the ban will temporarily remain in place and the government said it would appeal the decision.
Xi Jinping has called for the renminbi to become a global reserve currency, in some of his clearest comments on his ambitions for China’s currency as Beijing seeks to play a greater role in the international monetary system.
In commentary published on Saturday in Qiushi, the ruling communist party’s flagship ideology journal, China’s president said the country needed to build a “powerful currency” that could be “widely used in international trade, investment and foreign exchange markets, and attain reserve currency status”.
China’s leadership has long sought to promote the internationalisation of the renminbi. But the comments marked Xi’s clearest definition yet of his goal of a “strong currency”, as well as the broader financial foundations Beijing will need to build to support it.
These include a “powerful central bank” capable of effective monetary management, globally competitive financial institutions and international financial centres able to “attract global capital and exert influence over global pricing,” Xi wrote.
The comments were originally part of a speech Xi delivered in 2024 to top regional officials, but had not been released publicly until this week.
The publication of Xi’s comments comes amid heightened uncertainty in global markets as a weaker US dollar — which President Donald Trump last week called a “great” development — a change in leadership of the Federal Reserve and geopolitical and trade tensions have prompted central banks to rethink their exposure to dollar assets.
“China senses the change of the global order more real than before,” said Kelvin Lam, senior China+ economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. Xi’s emphasis on the renminbi reflected “recent ruptures in the global order”, he added.
China’s central bank governor Pan Gongsheng last year forecast a new global currency order, telling investors, regulators and local officials in Shanghai that the renminbi would compete with other currencies in a “multi-polar international monetary system”.
“Beijing wants the yuan to be a serious global currency — not necessarily to replace the dollar overnight, but to be a strategic counterweight that limits US leverage in a fracturing financial order,” said Han Shen Lin, China country director at The Asia Group.
The renminbi has become the world’s second-largest trade finance currency since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but it plays a limited role in official reserves. As of the third quarter of 2025, the dollar accounted for about 57 per cent of global reserves, down from 71 per cent in 2000, while the euro stood at roughly 20 per cent, according to data from the IMF. The renminbi was sixth, at just 1.93 per cent.
Analysts said an open capital account and full convertibility were critical for global investors and central banks to hold more renminbi.
China’s trading partners have also called for Beijing to allow a sharper appreciation of the renminbi, which they argue is undervalued, making the country’s exports cheaper and helping fuel an unprecedented trade surplus that hit $1.2tn last year.
IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva late last year called on China to fix “imbalances” in its economy, including deflation that she said had “resulted in significant real exchange rate depreciation”.
People’s Bank of China vice-governor Zou Lan said at a conference last month that China had no intention of using a weaker renminbi to gain a trade advantage.
Chinese policymakers have signalled tolerance for mild appreciation, allowing the renminbi to strengthen past Rmb7 against a weaker US dollar. But it has continued to depreciate against the euro.
“The core objective of China’s foreign exchange policy is to keep the renminbi stable and preserve its role as a store of value,” Lam said.
China’s priorities of reviving stronger domestic growth and advances in emerging technology would support longer-term appreciation for the renminbi, said Zhang Jun, chief economist at China Galaxy Securities.
Asia Group’s Han said: “Xi’s rhetoric won’t flip global foreign exchange markets today but it cements a long-term tilt investors are already sniffing out.”
“Overall, Beijing senses the dollar’s shine isn’t unblemished and will nudge its currency forward.”
Amazon Web Services are down in the UAE.