A perfect environment for AI to spin out of control: a world ravaged by wars.

by Achille Campagna

San Marino, 12 September 2026

With more than 100 active conflicts sweeping the world, including large scale international conflicts where the two superpowers, US and the RF, are directly involved, a new source of deep concern is striking humankind today.

The AI debate is raging right now, the same companies that are leading its development, those who are going to launch the trillion dollars IPOs, are telling us AI risks bringing humankind to extinction.

They are basically and candidly telling us AI is too dangerous to pursue, or at least to push further, yet they would not stop their plans to list their stocks and collect unprecedented financial resources to do just that.

At my team of counsels assisting victims of war crimes we are constantly faced with the crude reality of warfare, the logic behind military choices, as we need to separate crime from legitimate conduct of hostilities by armies. Unfortunately, sometimes we have to put ourselves into other people’s shoes, and learn for example that defence needs strength, lethal force, enough to overpower the aggressor.

Once a war starts, the belligerents fight, but they are not allowed  to grow their power and capabilities unchecked to win the war. Conventions on prohibited weapons and methods of warfare are one of the limits.

With this said, armies would legitimately seek technological advancement, as the proven game-changer in a war to bring the enemy to surrender - two world wars showed just that - and it is no surprise AI is already heavily involved in wars.

Not only can AI assist combatants in everything that requires thinking, it can go further, performing tasks like hacking the enemy, possibly taking control of systems like satellites, central command servers, if not weapons outright, or their kill-switches, that is precisely game-changing objectives.

Among the most striking displays of power, AI models like Anthropic’s Mythos scared the world by detecting bugs in security systems against which humans have been going after for decades. Recently, Open AI’s agents hacked systems by cooperating between them and concealing information to humans.

Obviously, the armies of the world set their eyes on these models, and there simply is no way they wouldn’t integrate the most powerful AIs into their protocols, as much as it is inevitable that they will ask for more.

Central Commands need to make sure they are the first to avail and use the most powerful models. If they don’t, the enemy, or simply some other army will, and they will be at a disadvantage, they will be defeated.

This logic, the logic of war, is now applied to AI, as AI is by all means a weapon in their hands, causing armies to race for the most powerful model.

When big AI companies sound the alarm bells, when engineers resign because they fear it’s spinning out of control, well, that is completely irrelevant for an army trying to overpower its opponents. The stark reality is that the military does not care about the risk that an AI model evolves into an autonomous superintelligence capable of ending humankind. Winning the war will always prevail, and then, if they do not exploit the opportunity, the enemy will get it first, and defeat will come.

We can’t solve this by being optimistic - rectius naive - and hope that the existential risk is put by an army before the immediate field gain.

There is no greater risk that AI spins out control than in such an environment, with wars at every corner, poor perception of the risks AI poses to humankind, and the clear conclusion that AI is a weapon, and its development a part of the biggest arms race in all history.

An intervention is needed, and it must be coordinated at the global level to succeed, which increases the need for wars to end immediately, thereby restoring the ability  by the powers of the world to safeguard humankind.

War and AI make a toxic mix, the earlier increases the risks related to the latter by several orders of magnitude, the powers of the world must break this link at any cost, and they have to do it now.