The International Security and Military Implications of Agentic AI

Executive summary

Building on recent advances, agentic artificial intelligence (AI) is an emerging technological paradigm and next wave in AI development that enables agents to autonomously pursue complex goals and interact with each other with minimal human supervision. Through increasingly autonomous agents, agentic AI is shifting the AI landscape from being a passive, supportive tool towards an active executor that can increasingly define and take courses of action. If implemented successfully, agentic AI expands the scope, scale, and complexity of potential AI use cases, including in domains where automation has traditionally proven to be difficult, while transforming human-machine collaboration. However, expectations around AI agents have been characterised by hype and inflated promises. While AI agent performance appears to be increasing rapidly across different use cases and sectors, many real-world agentic AI applications are still in an experimental stage, and agents have turned out to be rather limited in their autonomy and effectiveness. It is therefore important to look beyond the hype accompanying agentic AI by critically assessing and filtering out the noise. This analysis aims to provide a better understanding by exploring the terminology and foundations of agentic AI and critically assessing its current state and anticipated capabilities.

Agentic AI has an inherent dual-use potential that is bound to transform business and military applications alike. However, uncertainties remain around its future capabilities and pace of development as well as existing technical limitations and other barriers that could slow down the deployment of agents and hinder broader agentic adoption. In the military sphere, agentic AI can act as an analytical enabler, force multiplier, and disruptor and provide potential benefits for offensive and defensive actions. The development of agentic AI is giving rise to the concept of agentic warfare in which autonomous agents could provide battlefield advantages by playing increasingly important roles across military functions such as intelligence, planning, logistics, and decision-making. Before deployment at scale, it is crucial to assess the technology’s trajectory and potential implications for the future of warfare.

This forward-looking analysis explores how agentic AI development takes place amidst commercial and military adoption races and intensifying geopolitical competition. The technology and its integration into commercial and military systems creates significant implications for international security and strategic stability and raises questions around the proliferation and misuse of the technology. Despite improving autonomous capabilities, promising use cases, and various anticipated benefits, increasingly autonomous agents also raise significant societal, security, legal, and ethical risks that may threaten a successful, effective and sustainable implementation of agentic AI if left unaddressed. While amplifying certain challenges prevalent in existing AI systems, agentic AI and its potential convergence with other emerging technologies introduces a variety of novel risks and vulnerabilities. This requires actors that seek to leverage the potential of AI agents to find a balance between autonomy and security. It also demands regulatory attention and risk mitigation while the technology is still in its early stages and before deployment at scale.