# Governing Automated Strategic Intelligence

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17087 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17087/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 103 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08909/) (2020)
- [WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09332/) (2021)
- [Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09516/) (2025)
- [The relationship between trust in AI and trustworthy machine learning technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00782/) (2019)
- [Is GPT-4 a Good Data Analyst?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15038/) (2023)
- [Escalation Risks from Language Models in Military and Diplomatic Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03408/) (2024)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Dynamic Route Planning for Minimizing Travel Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01771/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Military and economic strategic competitiveness between nation-states will increasingly be defined by the capability and cost of their frontier artificial intelligence models. Among the first areas of geopolitical advantage granted by such systems will be in automating military intelligence. Much discussion has been devoted to AI systems enabling new military modalities, such as lethal autonomous weapons, or making strategic decisions. However, the ability of a country of "CIA analysts in a data-center" to synthesize diverse data at scale, and its implications, have been underexplored. Multimodal foundation models appear on track to automate strategic analysis previously done by humans. They will be able to fuse today's abundant satellite imagery, phone-location traces, social media records, and written documents into a single queryable system. We conduct a preliminary uplift study to empirically evaluate these capabilities, then propose a taxonomy of the kinds of ground truth questions these systems will answer, present a high-level model of the determinants of this system's AI capabilities, and provide recommendations for nation-states to remain strategically competitive within the new paradigm of automated intelligence.