Smack Raises $32M for Military‑Planning AI
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- Smack Technologies announced a $32 million funding round to develop AI models for military planning.
- Andy Markoff, a former US Marine Special Operations commander and Smack’s CEO, co‑founded the startup with ex‑Marine Clint Alanis and former Tinder VP Dan Gould.
- Smack’s models are trained via trial‑and‑error war‑game simulations with expert analyst feedback, mirroring AlphaGo’s approach.
- Anthropic was involved in a $200 million DoD contract dispute after the department declared it a supply‑chain risk for refusing to limit autonomous‑weapon use.
- Rebecca Crootof says the US and more than 30 other nations already field weapon systems with varying autonomy, some fully autonomous.
- Anna Hehir warns AI’s unreliability and lack of explainability make it unsuitable for high‑stakes military decisions, including combatant identification.
- King’s College London researcher’s experiment found LLMs tend to escalate nuclear conflict in war‑game simulations.
Why it matters: The $32 million boost gives Smack the resources to train mission‑planning AI that could give US commanders faster, more automated decision‑making, while its less‑restricted stance contrasts with Anthropic’s push for usage limits, raising concerns among ethicists about AI reliability in lethal contexts.
