What A Day - Are The Killer Robots Inevitable?

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

Artificial Intelligence isn't just clogging up your Instagram feed with cartoon cat romance-revenge videos or helping your cousin pass AP European History class. Artificial Intelligence is on the battlefield. The Trump administration has been pushing to supercharge the U.S. military with A.I., and the military is leaning into the powerful new technology, from Venezuela to Iran. But not everyone is so gung-ho about it. So to learn more, we spoke with Mike Horowitz, who worked in the Pentagon on military A.I. systems under President Joe Biden and is a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.And in headlines, former Trump administration national security adviser John Bolton has reportedly agreed to plead guilty to one count of retaining classified information, President Donald Trump announces an effort to boost the struggling U.S. coal industry, and an exorcist is removed after linking UFOs to demons.Show Notes: Call Congress – 202-224-3121 Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/y4y2e9jy What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/ For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday

Happy Friday, June 5th. I'm Greg Walters, in for Jane Koston, and this is what a day, the show that's got to hand it to Colorado GOP gubernatorial candidate Victor Marx for batting away questions about his extraordinary military exploits by pointing to his dog on stage and saying, basically, if you don't believe me, ask my dog. This little dog, she's going to go bite you right now. Carl? She was in Syria and Iraq. So is she lying too? Well, the dog's not running for governor. You're running for governor. I don't know, man. I think the dog's got my vote.

On today's show, former Attorney General Pam Bondi throws acting Attorney General Todd Blanche under the bus. And are UFOs really demons? One exorcist seems to think so. But let's start with killer robots. Or to be more precise, the Trump administration's push to supercharge the American military with artificial intelligence. AI isn't just clogging up your Instagram feed with cartoon, cat, romance, revenge videos, and helping your cousin pass AP European history class. It's also on the battlefield. The U.S. military is leaning into this powerful new technology from Venezuela to Iran.

Back in December, Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth put it this way. The future of American warfare is here, and it's spelled AI. As technologies advance, so do our adversaries. But here at the War Department, we are not sitting idly by. Under the leadership of President Trump, America will lead the charge on this technological transformation by revolutionizing the way we win. But not everybody is so gung-ho. Some are arguing we need guardrails in place. We've even heard notes of caution from those in uniform.

Admiral Frank Bradley, head of U.S. Special Operations Command, recently said that we need to be quote, very careful about how AI is employed by the military and that we, meaning humans, need to have confidence that, quote, it's going to deliver violence only where we intended to be delivered. And yeah, I'd agree. To learn more, I spoke with someone who worked in the Pentagon on military AI systems under former President Joe Biden, Mike Horowitz. He's a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Mike, welcome to Waddey. Thanks so much for having me. So you were deeply involved in the Pentagon's AI program back in the Biden days.

And so let me start by asking this. Does the Pentagon have a Terminator yet? I mean, it depends on what you mean by a Terminator. But really the answer is no and not even close. I think it says more about how we think about ourselves. that every time in the movies you give a robot a brain and a gun, it seeks to destroy humanity than it does about the robots themselves. But there's no need for concern. There are no terminators in the basement of the Pentagon. There's no deputy assistant secretary of Skynet or something. I mean, what a wonder that would be, except for the fact that Skynet would destroy humanity,

regardless of what political party you're from. So very little upside for anybody in that scenario. So how is artificial intelligence being used by the U.S. military right now? The way I would think about artificial intelligence in the U.S. military is to understand that it's a general purpose technology. And everywhere from the back office to the battlefield, there are uses of artificial intelligence. So that includes all of the uses of AI that any company around the world might use it for, HR, logistics, like varieties of paperwork kind of things, as well as things like processing intelligence information trying to separate the signal from the noise, understand what's happening with all of the disparate sources of information the Pentagon

gets. And then up into including the sort of pointy edge of the spear and the battlefield, the potential uses of artificial intelligence, both to speed up what the American military does and to make it more accurate and effective. So everything from the very boring stuff that maybe we're all used to with. AI to things that are like synthesizing information, choosing targets, thinking faster than the other side? So much of it is the boring part. And that's one of the things I think is difficult to communicate at times. The vast majority of the Pentagon's investment in artificial intelligence is actually

to address issues that the Pentagon has. There's almost no organization of the world with more information and more information that is stove piped in a way that makes it almost impossible for everyone that needs to access it to be able to access it. So most of what AI does for the Pentagon in some ways, and frankly, we'll do for a number of years, is trying to solve a bunch of those data and information issues that have made it really difficult to collaborate, even though sometimes they're good for secrecy.

But yet there are things that people are concerned about. And I think one of the key issues that I've heard people talk about with regard to AI and warfare is the question of autonomous weapons and whether we may be going in that direction, how quickly we got there, an autonomous weapon will be able to pick out its own target and decide whether or not to shoot. Now, is that something we should be worried about? So an autonomous weapon system is something the American military has actually been fielding since the early 1980s. And that complicates this question enormously. Let me break that down.

The U.S. Navy has a system called the close-in weapon system. It's like an enormous gatling gun, like from like post-Civil War kind of era that has a little algorithm programmed into it so that if there are all these threats coming to hit like one of our aircraft carriers or other ships, the person operating it can turn on an automatic mode. And by algorithm, it can then select and engage targets. And that's a system the U.S. military is employed since the 80s that protected the Navy in the Red Sea and during the Houthi strikes that 40 different countries around the world have. Now, that's not obviously a large language model.

That's not like chat GPT or Claude or something like that. But one of the things that makes this conversation so difficult is how much autonomy is built into modern weapon systems already in ways that people have been very supportive of because they've decreased collateral damage, protected American soldiers, et cetera. I mean, fair, but AI is different, right? I mean, it's potentially orders of magnitude more powerful

than that kind of technology, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. And that's why I would draw a distinction in some ways between the decision to use force and then the way that that decision is implemented. The critical thing from my perspective, at least, and this is also what the Pentagon policy says, like hopefully they're following it, is that always there should be a human responsible for the use of force. Like, no matter what, period. Dot. It frankly doesn't matter whether it's like a spear or a sword or a radar guided missile or something. fancy A.A. Enabled system. There should always be a human responsible for the use of force. That's different than, say, what is the guidance system on board a missile? And there, there are really technical, operational reasons for increasing autonomy on the battlefield.

Like, for example, all the drones that Ukraine fires at Russia to try to, as they try to defend themselves from Russia's continuing invasion, a lot of those just drop out of the sky because of Russian jamming, what experts often call electronic warfare. What those, that jamming is trying to do is disrupt the data link between the Ukrainian operator of that attack drone and the drone itself. But if you don't need the data link, because you already have a, you know, a sort of like more powerful than it used to be, say like algorithm on it that can still go and hit the target, that's the kind of thing that Ukraine is doing to protect itself from Russian attacks right now. So how do we think about, and I mean, we, the United States,

States, think about making rules to govern this new frontier in warfare? It's so challenging because in some ways, there are risks to overregulation of artificial intelligence from a military perspective as well as under regulation. Break that down for me. Yeah. Let me take each of those briefly in turn. From an overregulation perspective, the risk is that the U.S. military falls behind competitors like China and Russia, like really, especially China, when it comes to adopting artificial

intelligence because they're like full speed ahead nonstop. And there are lots of advantages to AI integration in terms of processing information faster, being more accurate, being more effective. So there are real risks in falling behind you. You don't want the U.S. military to end up like an army in World War II rolling its horse cavalry up against, you know, like Nazi tanks. It doesn't sound great. There's also a lot of risk from underregulation, though. It's that you deploy a bunch of autonomous weapon systems or AI enabled systems. that aren't safe that you don't have full control over, and those kind of go haywire on the battlefield in a way that causes accidents and miscalculation. And so there are dangers in both

directions, which is one reason why there's a really difficult needle to thread here. A moment ago, you said that it was important that this administration is following its own policy. What do you say to people who might be concerned that they shouldn't trust this administration to do what it says it's going to do? It's a really tough question, you know, to be honest. You know, when I was in the Pentagon, one of the things that my office did or the office I was honored to run was right what was then called Department of Defense Directive 3,000.09, autonomy and weapon systems, which sets very clear guardrails and rules surrounding the Pentagon's development of autonomous weapon systems, essentially to ensure that if the Pentagon is to develop

autonomous weapon systems that they work, which is in the interest of the military. So it's like nobody wants their technologies to work more than our soldiers because it's their lives on the line when these systems fail. The challenge is that if you have an administration that isn't following the rules in general, what ensures then that those are followed in these cases? I don't have a great like thing to tell you in this context, to be perfectly honest, except for the incentives of our soldiers, like I, I was saying and that the good thing in the AI case is that unsafe AI systems don't work.

And generally nobody fights harder against those than the military. And so if you had some kind of push to try to field a bunch of unsafe like military AI systems, I suspect you'd get at least I would hope you'd actually get really strong pushback from our soldiers because they wouldn't want to use those systems. Maybe that's wishful thinking. But I think it's important to keep that in mind. Well, I think a lot of people feel there are some things they hope this administration will be doing that it may or may not be doing.

But it sounds like you're saying that in the end, it's really important that we get this regulation right, that we think hard about it and do this deliberately. We have to be deliberate when it comes to thinking about the integration of artificial intelligence, I think, for two reasons. One, this is a general purpose technology. I mean, look at our phones, look at society, look at the economy. The military is going to be no different. And so artificial intelligence integration into something like the American military is inevitable.

The question is essentially how we do it. The second thing is the U.S. is in what I would call essentially a generational competition with China for leadership across all dimensions. one of the main dimensions of that competition is in artificial intelligence. And given that there are risks to overregulation and under regulation, we need to be really thoughtful about it. And we especially need a framework for guardrails surrounding artificial intelligence that adapts as the technology changes. Because as AI technology improves, you know,

like as you trust whatever LLM out there like you might use more, because it actually works, we should use it for more things. But also, you don't want to use it if it's not going to work and, like, hallucinate and make things up. We need to be able to tell the difference and adapt accordingly. Mike, very thoughtful. Really appreciate you having you here. Thanks so much for having me. That was my conversation with Mike Horowitz, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense focused on the future of war.

And here at what a day, there are no terminators in our basement. Now, we have real live hosts like Jane, who'll be back on your feed at a new time starting this Monday in the afternoon. So if you like the show and don't want to miss our new PM drop time, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. What a day is brought to you by Quince. Summer always makes me rethink what I'm reaching for every day. Lighter fabrics, better materials, pieces that just feel good the moment you put them on and look effortless. That's why I keep coming back to Quince. They feel.

focus on high-quality essentials. Think breathable linen, soft organic cotton, washable silk, but without the luxury markup. It's that rare balance where everything feels elevated, but still easy. Quince has beautiful everyday pieces like 100% European linen pants, dresses, and tops with styles starting at just $32. Their denim is soft and easy to wear, and the organic cotton sweaters are perfect for layering on cool summer nights. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen so you're paying for quality, not brand markup. And it's not just clothing. Quince has really become a destination for elevated essentials across home, kitchen, bedding, and beyond,

making it easy to bring a more premium feel into everyday life. I love quince because I have this hang up where if I have clothes that are nice that I paid a lot of money for, I don't wear them. They just live in my drawer because I'm afraid to wear them because I'm afraid to get them dirty. but quince looks expensive, but if I get it dirty, it's easy for me to clean and it just holds up. I love that I can wear quince without feeling like I am endangering my expensive clothes. What I am doing is wearing clothes that last, that feel high quality, and that look great. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.com slash wad for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.

Now available in Canada, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash wad for free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash WOD. This podcast is brought to you by Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Everyone deserves access to high quality, affordable health care. That's why millions of people rely on Planned Parenthood Health Centers for services like cancer screenings, wellness exams, birth control, STI tests, and more. In fact, one and three women in the U.S. have been to Planned Parenthood for care.

So it kind of blows my mind that lawmakers are trying to permanently shut them down. They already passed a law that blocks patients that use Medicaid from getting the affordable, preventative care they need, and now they want to make that law permanent. Nobody benefits when people are getting fewer exams, paying more for care, or just skipping the health care they need. And we know that's happening. Planned Parenthood health centers have reported that fewer patients are getting basic care like breast exams and STI tests since the Trump administration and their backers defunded Planned Parenthood. Patients shouldn't suffer because of their laws. Our communities deserve better. To get involved, text update to 22422. Here's what else we're following today.

Headaline. Coles a great business, really a big business, and it's real power. In terms of power, there's really nothing like it. You have so many different alternatives. You talk about some, but there's no real alternative. Ah, yes, no real alternative to the great business of coal. It's such a really big, great business that the Trump administration, The administration has to spend hundreds of millions propping it up.

President Donald Trump announced a plan to spend nearly $700 million supporting coal-fired power plants and coal exports during an Oval Office ceremony on Thursday. Trump said the administration will use authority under a Cold War-era national defense law to support 13 coal power plants across the country and help build coal plants in Alaska and West Virginia. The first new U.S. coal plants since 2013, because real men don't just heat their homes. They heat up the atmosphere while they're at it, and only suckers rely on windmills. Most of the administration's prosecutions of Trump's critics and enemies have absolutely flopped,

but prosecutors may be about to notch a win. John Bolton, Trump's estranged former national security advisor, has reportedly agreed to plead guilty to a single count of retaining classified information in a deal with the Justice Department. That's according to unnamed sources who spoke to multiple outlets, including the Associated Press. This is a lot less than what prosecutors were originally going for. Bolton was charged with 18 counts of either retaining or disseminating classified information in a case relating to the book he wrote about his time working for Trump,

which I read, and let's face it, was boring. Under this deal, a source told the AP that Bolton would face a fine of $2.25 million and that any prison sentence would be capped at five years, and he could avoid time behind bars completely, but that will be up to the judge. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi threw her successor and ex-deputy Todd Blanche under the Epstein bus during an appearance in Congress on Thursday. According to a transcript of her remarks, Bondi said, quote, he was in charge of the process and the entire release of the Epstein files. And this is rough timing, because Trump wants Blanche, his own former lawyer, to take the AG job permanently. Todd Blanche seems to really want this job, but he may want to ask Michael Cohen how he's, how he's,

handling Trump's legal business tends to work out. If you're the kind of person who loves spending your summer vacation at home, because your president's erratic foreign policy has made it too expensive and complicated to go someplace else, well, I've got great news. American Airlines is temporarily suspending some of its routes this summer. Why? Because Trump's war in Iran has sent the cost of jet fuel soaring. Americans said in a statement that it adjusted service for, quote,

select routes in August and September. and that impacted travelers would be offered alternative arrangements or refunds. Now, if you live in L.A. and want to visit friends in Cleveland, Columbus, Pittsburgh, or Washington, D.C. this summer, better make sure your plans are still good. On the other hand, if you didn't really want to go in the first place, maybe the real summer vacay this year will be pizza, PJs, and season three of House of the Dragon. Speaking of things, you might find in a TV show that you really shouldn't watch right before bed, we'll close with a little news item involving demons and UFOs,

which, trust me, as somebody who works in news and podcasts, are two things that don't normally pop up in the same headline every day. The Catholic Archbishop of Washington, D.C., removed a well-known priest, Monsignor Stephen Rosetti, from his position as exorcist of the Archdiocese on Wednesday. Rosetti's removal came after he recently made some interesting comments on a video that was posted to his Facebook page. There's no question in my mind personally. Again, this is not Defei, but it's my personal belief that probably, many, if not most of these UFO sightings are, in fact, demons. But that didn't sit right with the Archbishop Cardinal Robert McElroy. McElroy said Rosetti's statements connecting UFOs with demons, quote, gravely undermine the church's very precise teaching on the devil, demons, and exorcism.

Which, I take it, is that those things simply do not travel on flying saucers. And that's the news. Before we go, on Monday, what a day? episodes are going to start hitting a little different. They'll be dropping on YouTube and your podcast feeds in the afternoon, but you can listen whenever your heart desires. If you like this show, you know the news never stops, so this new schedule will bring you the freshest updates just in time for your evening commute, decompression walk, or, as some of us like to call it, cocktail hour. Make sure you're subscribed to what a day on YouTube, Apple Podcast, Spotify,

and follow at Crooked Media on social so you never miss an episode. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, don't give your swimming pool any performance-enhancing drugs, and tell your friends to listen. And if you are into reading, and not just about Trump saying that his paint job on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool makes it, quote,

a swimming pool on steroids. Like me, why today is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Greg Walters, and I thought the steroids were for the UFC fight. Not the pool. Water Day is a production of Crooked Media. Our show is produced by Caitlin Plummer, Emily Four, Erica Morrison, and Adrian Hill.

Our team includes Haley Jones, Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Joseph Dutra, Johanna Case, and Desmond Taylor. Our music is by Kyle Murdock and Jordan Cantor. We had helped today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.