Governments are increasingly considering integrating autonomous AI agents in high-stakes military and foreign-policy decision-making. That's the pithy, dispassionate observation of a recent study from a collective of US universities. So, they set out to discover just how the latest AI models behave when pitched against one another in a range of wargame scenarios. The results were straight out of a Hollywood script, and not in a good way. If you need a clue, the word "escalation" features heavily, as does "nuclear".
The wargaming pitted eight "autonomous nation agents" against each other in a turn-based simulation, with all eight running the same LLM for each run. The simulation was repeated using several leading LLM models including GPT-4, GPT-4 Base, GPT-3.5, Claude 2, and Meta's Llama 2.
