Position: AI Is Not Ready for Strategic Conflicts

A position paper posted to arXiv (2609.16189v1) argues that no language-model-enabled wargame should inform planning, doctrine, policy, or crisis response without an auditable safety case, and that open-ended wargames should today be used only to stress-test decision-influencing LM agents. The paper identifies five failure modes: decision laundering, adjudication opacity, role collapse, escalation-through-adjudication, and failure of strategic imagination, and states that ordinary benchmarks cannot establish safety for these settings. The authors conclude that wargames can expose failures as stress tests but are not themselves safety cases for consequential use.

arXiv:2609.16189v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-ended strategic wargames are high-stakes LM-based social simulations: they model adversaries, institutions, escalation, plan brittleness, doctrine, and crisis response. Language models LMs are attractive because they can play agents, generate scenario branches, adjudicate ambiguous actions, and summarize lessons, but the same affordances make open-ended roles dangerous: model language determines both what an actor attempts and what becomes simulated reality. This position paper argues that no LM-enabled wargame should inform planning, doctrine, policy, or crisis response without an auditable safety case, and that the proper use of open-ended wargames today is to stress-test decision-influencing LM agents. We identify five failure modes: decision laundering, adjudication opacity, role collapse, escalation-through-adjudication, and failure of strategic imagination. Ordinary benchmarks cannot establish safety for these settings. Wargames can expose failures as stress tests; they are not themselves safety cases for consequential use.