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The Army Wants to Sic AI Agents on Its Enemies. What Could Go Wrong?

Documents obtained by The Intercept show the military is trying to deploy autonomous AI agents to hack its adversaries.

As global governments and tech giants reckon with widespread of revelations of autonomous AI agents unexpectedly breaking into computer systems, documents obtained by The Intercept show the U.S. Army is looking to harness that exact technology to seek and destroy.

Army Cyber Command is developing a platform to turn AI agents into autonomous weapons that can navigate and “neutralize” the computer systems of adversaries, the documents show.

Since 2010, Army Cyber Command, or ARCYBER, has led the U.S. Army’s cyber operations. This includes the defensive effort of protecting domestic computer systems and the secretive offensive work of hacking military targets. So far, this has largely been the work of human soldiers operating computers, like those of the 780th Military Intelligence Brigade. But as the government races to adopt artificial intelligence technology, ARCYBER is looking to offload some of its attacks to AI.

The nascent program, codenamed “ECHOTRIBBLE,” is based on one of the leading trends of the AI boom: agents. AI agents are essentially software programs that leverage machine learning technology, often large language models like Anthropic’s Claude, to autonomously accomplish tasks provided by their user. Consumers can deploy AI agents to schedule meetings, generate itineraries, make online purchases, or book tickets. Through ECHOTRIBBLE, the Pentagon plans to turn AI agents into tools of war “designed to autonomously navigate infrastructures” and capable of “identifying and neutralizing identified threats/targets,” according to an ARCYBER document reviewed by The Intercept circulated to potential contractors.

Pete Hegseth’s Military of the Future: Defined by AI and an Utter Lack of Oversight

The military’s adoption of cutting-edge technologies is unsurprising, especially considering Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s fervent embrace of AI. But amid constant revelations of rogue behavior by agents, the potential for serious mishaps is immense, experts warn.

“Given the known failure modes of the current AI paradigm, making autonomous AI systems with a mandate to ‘neutralize threats’ is incredibly dangerous,” David Krueger, a professor of machine learning at the University of Montreal who founded Evitable, an organization that advocates for a moratorium on AI development. “We’ve seen AI systems knowingly attack systems that were not intended targets. In simulations, AIs have even proven willing to kill to achieve their goals.”

A Q&A document answering questions from potential contractors offers more details about the initiative. It explains that ECHOTRIBBLE is “primarily focused” on offensive missions, and explains that “neutralizing” a target could include “disabling the threat completely or temporarily, deleting the threat from the target.” ECHOTRIBBLE would function almost like a computer worm, silently navigating a foreign network and hopping from device to device until it finds the Army’s quarry, hitting targets in the cloud as well as those on “air-gapped” systems that are disconnected from networks entirely.

Once its task is complete, ECHOTRIBBLE’s agents would........

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