The U.S. Navy is in the process of developing armed robot submarines, which could theoretically be used to kill without direct human oversight.
The project is being developed by the Office of Naval Research under the name CLAWS, although it has not been made clear exactly what the acronym stands for. In budget documents, the autonomous underwater weapons system is described as being useful for increasing “mission areas into kinetic effects.” New Scientist, which was first to publish details of these documents, describes this as “military-speak for destroying things.”
CLAWS would not be a standalone vehicle. Instead, it would equip robot submarines with the necessary algorithms and smart sensors to be able to autonomously complete missions. This might include finding targets or evading attacks resulting from anti-submarine systems.
The project has been known about since 2018. That year, the U.S. Navy made requests for funding to help “improve the autonomy and survivability of large and extra-large unmanned underwater vehicles.” However, it is only recently that additional information about the project has suggested that it will involve weapons, rather than simply being an exploratory technology for gathering undersea data.
New Scientist believes that CLAWS could be deployed on the Navy’s Orca submarines, long-range robot subs developed by Boeing. Images of the Orca subs depict them as around 25 meters in length, and kitted out with 12 torpedo tubes. Although there has been no confirmation that this is the case, it is possible that these could be under the control of CLAWS, allowing the subs to “find and sink” targets autonomously during their 90-day maximum missions.
The recently published Department of Defense Fiscal Year (FY) 2021 Budget Estimates makes multiple mentions of autonomous undersea vehicles and autonomous warfare, suggesting that this is one focus of the Department of Defense going forward. CLAWS has been allocated $26 million in this year’s U.S. Navy budget. Another $23 million will follow next year. If a working prototype is developed, it could be deployed as soon as June 2022.
This isn’t the first potentially autonomous weapons system Digital Trends has covered. In August 2019, we wrote about plans by the U.S. Army to develop artificial intelligence-guided missiles that use A.I. to pursue their targets. At the time, we noted that several contractors were competing to win the Cannon-Delivered Area Effects Munition (C-DAEM) bid. Prototype demonstrations of the missile are set to be shown off in 2021.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.