Anthony King

Professor of War Studies at the University of Warwick. His 2025 book AI, Automation, and War: The Rise of a Military-Tech Complex argues that the popular framing of military AI — autonomous killer robots on one side, reassuring talk of humans-in-the-loop on the other — misreads what is actually happening: AI is not automating war, it is fusing intelligence and targeting data at speeds beyond human reach. The book is built on roughly a decade of fieldwork and 126 interviews with serving officers, defence-ministry officials, and the executives of the technology companies now selling into the Pentagon, Whitehall, and the Israel Defense Forces.

Pulls the AI-warfare debate back from speculation onto empirical ground, and reframes it as a sociological story about a new military-tech complex of software firms — Palantir, Anduril, Helsing — being woven into the operational core of Western militaries.