The AI ​​war is here, and CBS News got a look at how the US military is training to use it on the battlefield

Tan Tan, Morocco – In the arid south of Morocco, where the Sahara Desert meets the Atlantic coast, the peace of the desert was shattered by explosions and gunfire.

Piles of smoke from conventional vehicles fill the air as US forces take part in African Lion 2026 military training. But the US Army has also used war games to test a range of systems powered by artificial intelligence.

African Lion was the largest US-led military operation in Africa, conducted with 30 partner countries to train for the future of the war. Increasingly, that future belongs to AI.

Alongside the military, more than a dozen private contractors have marketed products and received feedback directly from the military as they vie for roles — and contracts — to help modernize the U.S. military.

Reducing the “kill chain”

As soldiers practiced battlefield tactics, a robot rolled silently across the Moroccan desert with a machine gun on its roof. Drones took to the skies nearby carrying explosives, and another prototype quadcopter carried a nine-millimeter gun.

One of the main applications of AI that was demonstrated during the exercise was an attempt to reduce the “kill chain” – the series of actions necessary to use lethal force, from the identification of the target to the moment the trigger is pulled.

Lt. Col. Col. Ramon Leonguerrero told CBS News that staff at the Joint Operations Center in Agadir, hundreds of miles from the battlefield, used an AI-powered platform made by US defense company Palantir to “provide this decision-making cycle faster than usual.”

“Five years ago, this might have taken two or three hours,” he told CBS News about the decision made during a single workout. “We did it in three minutes.”

In those missions, there was someone at the end of the kill chain who approved the target and ordered the artillery to strike. But Leonguerrero told CBS News that autonomous systems that will decide when to pull the trigger without a human in the loop, to save even more time, are already in place. He would not say what, if any, real-world jobs have used these systems.

In the operating center, a large number of people sat in front of a large screen and coordinated the movement on the floor.

The program powering much of the work was Project Maven, the Pentagon’s flagship intelligence initiative, developed by Palantir. Maven ingests massive amounts of battlefield data and uses AI to identify patterns and prioritize information for commanders, such as deciding what to target.

Anthropic’s Claude AI is still relevant despite the row with the Pentagon

According to multiple military and industry sources familiar with the systems in use, Maven’s communication with human operators relies on Anthropic’s Claude large-scale language model. The software helps users query and synthesize what Leonguerrero calls a “sea of ​​data,” allowing operators to interact with battlefield intelligence in plain English.

Tests showed that Anthropic still plays a significant role, despite Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth publicly conflict with the company in recent months and calling it a “supply chain risk to national security.”

Anthropic has angered Trump administration officials by pushing for guard rails that would expressly prevent the military from using its powerful Claude AI model to spy on Americans — or to enable fully autonomous weapons.

“Ethical and ethical issues” to discover, but “the technology is there”

In the Moroccan desert, one American soldier expressed skepticism to CBS News about the idea of ​​allowing an independent system to make critical decisions.

“We will never transfer the responsibility of decisions to computers,” said the soldier, who asked not to be named. “Computers are powering us right now, and it’s my vision for the future, but I won’t be free to pass on the decision I’m making as an executive.”

“It’s a force multiplier that we have to keep exploring, and it’s not by any means a one-size-fits-all solution,” he added.

On April 30, Hegseth told the Senate Armed Services Committee that AI will not make dangerous decisions on the battlefield, though he would not directly answer questions about whether that would always be the case.

“There are moral and ethical issues that we have to consider,” General Dagvin RM Anderson, who oversees the US military’s Africa Command, told CBS News, adding: “The technology is there, it won’t go away, and we ignore it at our peril.”

“Technology is evolving so fast that we’re working to keep up,” he admitted, calling the idea of ​​AI taking over deadly responsibilities from humans “worrying, and disturbing.”

“But it is also foolish not to take it because our enemies will take it,” he said.

“If you choose not to follow it, we will be in a critical situation,” he stressed. “I will not be willing to put our nation in that position.”

Seizing the robot advantage: “It’s about saving lives”

Another battlefield AI system demonstrated during an exercise in Morocco involves keeping soldiers away from the front lines entirely – by replacing them with robots. One of the most visible private defense contractors working on that case was Overland AI, a Seattle-based startup that put its ULTRA fully autonomous vehicle through its paces in the desert.

Using a laptop, a remote operator can tell ULTRA where to go with just a few clicks, and it will automatically find its way there, avoiding hazards and obstacles – and packing machine guns, mines and explosive charges to help deal with any that may arise.

Overland AI Director of Business Development Tim Bishop told CBS News that ULTRA can be used to protect soldiers by placing fire on the enemy. It can also lay mines to prevent enemy advance, and release explosives to breach an enemy line or structure.

At five meters tall and with off-road tires, the ULTRA raced ahead of soldiers toward the line of fire during the exercise, with cameras and sensors keeping remote operators aware of its movements.

Currently, the rolled machine gun is operated by a remote operator, but Bishop said it is technologically possible to automate that task in the future, with a machine that will decide when to fire.

1st Lt. Vincent Gasparri told CBS News that operations violations like the one he and other soldiers were doing that day were among the military’s most dangerous jobs, and replacing humans with robots would “undoubtedly” save lives.

“You don’t have to worry too much about security and life. You can move quickly and protect your soldiers while doing that,” he added, estimating that in one operation, they were able to replace about 40 people with just two robots.

Gasparri leads the 173rd Airborne Brigade’s Bayonet Innovation Team, the US Army’s leading innovation force involved in the project. He admitted he was nervous about how autonomous weapons systems would be deployed in combat, but said he was driven by the goal of protecting his fellow soldiers.

“I choose to look around and measure the work we do today as a metric for the number of lives we will save in the future,” he told CBS News. “We have to use every advantage, get efficiency, be the fastest, the strongest, be able to make decisions faster than the opponent, because it’s about saving lives.”