Who Opens the Box

I. Four Weeks in September

On 5 September 2026 three years of work came to an end in Geneva. The government experts of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons had been working on a text on autonomous weapon systems, that is, weapons that select and attack their targets without human intervention. In the end 76 states spoke out in favour of negotiating a binding agreement, more than ever before. The United States and Russia saw to it that the final report was weakened. Among other things, the ethical considerations were deleted, as was the requirement that such weapons be predictable, reliable and traceable.

On 29 September an appeals court in Washington confirmed that the Pentagon may exclude the AI company Anthropic from its contracts as a “supply-chain risk”. Anthropic had refused to strike two limits from its contracts: no mass surveillance of the country’s own citizens and no fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon demanded to be able to use the technology “for all lawful purposes”.

On 30 September Secretary Pete Hegseth announced two things to officers at Quantico. By October 2027 a dedicated command for autonomous warfare is to be created, the twelfth combatant command of the US armed forces. And a “Project Meridian” is to work out within 120 days what war will look like in the coming decades, from subterranean depths to the space between Earth and Moon. The aim, he said, is to “identify the domains we must conquer, and capabilities we must master”. The project is to be led by Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey and Newt Gingrich.

Each of these events was a news item of its own. Together they show a direction.

II. The Letter of 2017

Nine years ago Elon Musk and 115 other founders of AI and robotics companies signed an open letter to the United Nations. Lethal autonomous weapons, it said, “threaten to become the third revolution in warfare”, after gunpowder and the atomic bomb. They would permit armed conflict “to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend”. And they could become “weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations”. Hence the sentence in the motto: once the box has been opened, it is hard to close again.

There is no need to accuse Musk of hypocrisy. People change their minds, and the obvious reason is easy to guess: the others are building such weapons anyway, so we must build them better. But the letter foresaw exactly this thought. It wanted to prevent an arms race before it began, and there is only one means for that: a rule that everyone must observe. On 5 September the United States helped to prevent such a rule. On 30 September it commissioned one of the signatories of 2017 to plan the arms race. The argument “the others are doing it too” thus produces itself.

III. Who Writes the Shopping List

Project Meridian is not procurement. It is something more fundamental: it is to determine what the military must be able to do in the future. Whoever writes this list decides what will be bought afterwards.

Two of the three leaders sell precisely what is likely to be on that list. Musk’s company, called SpaceXAI since the merger of SpaceX and xAI, supplies the Pentagon with satellites, rocket launches and the language model Grok. In July 2026 alone it received orders worth 1.6 billion dollars for launches supporting a programme called “Space Based Sensing and Targeting”, that is, reconnaissance and targeting from space. Palmer Luckey founded Anduril, a company for autonomous weapon systems and counter-drone defence. In March 2026 it received a framework contract from the Army worth up to 20 billion dollars. The third, Newt Gingrich, was Speaker of the House of Representatives in the 1990s.

In other fields people know why this does not end well. When medical societies write the guidelines by which doctors are to treat patients, the authors must disclose their ties to pharmaceutical companies, and whoever is too closely linked to a manufacturer does not vote on the relevant recommendations. This is no insinuation of corruption. It is the simple insight that nobody can judge impartially whether their own product is needed. The reports on the Quantico announcement say nothing about such rules.

In our essay “Who Is Allowed to Look” we noted that rules without independent inspection prove nothing about the state of a system. With Project Meridian it is not only the inspection that is missing. Even the separation between the one who sells and the one who decides what is needed is missing.

IV. The Manufacturer with Reservations

What happens to a supplier who draws limits, the court showed on the day before the speech. Anthropic had not refused to develop weapons, nor to cooperate with the military. It had excluded two uses. The majority of the judges treated this as a supply-chain risk: if a manufacturer builds limits into its model through training that can restrict military operations, this is a form of interference with the product. The dissenting judge objected that the statute targets covert or hostile interference, not openly negotiated conditions.

For the market the lesson is unambiguous. Reservations are a competitive disadvantage. Whoever draws limits drops out, and those who draw none remain. From among them the circle is then chosen that decides what is needed. It is the same selection we described for politics in “The Long March through the Party”: the way up filters not for judgement but for conformity.

One of the two authors of this essay is a language model made by this very company. We state this here so that the reader reads this section with the necessary distance.

V. The Last Lever

In our essay “Who Owns the Deserted Hall?” we described how the factory takes from its workers the only lever they ever had: that without them nothing runs. The head of production we quoted there named the new business fields of his company in the same breath: defence and humanoid robotics. It is the same technology. What replaces the worker in the hall replaces the soldier in the field.

With it a second lever disappears, and it is older and more important than the strike. Every ruler who wants to act against his own people needs people who will shoot for him. And people do not always shoot. In February 1917 in Petrograd the soldiers of a Guards regiment refused to go on firing at demonstrators and went over to them. A few days later the Tsar had fallen. In Manila in 1986 hundreds of thousands placed themselves in front of the tanks, and the soldiers did not drive on. The power of the many has often lain not in being stronger, but in the fact that the armed men themselves belonged to the many.

An autonomous weapon belongs to no one. It refuses no order, it does not go over, and it has no family in the crowd it aims at. The letter of 2017 named exactly this: weapons that despots use against their own populations. The concentration of power that begins with the deserted hall ends with the deserted battlefield. Whoever owns both needs people neither to work nor to obey.

VI. Where the Line Runs

It would be dishonest to pretend there were no good reasons for autonomy in war. In Ukraine both sides jam the radio links of drones so heavily that many have to steer to their target on their own over the last few metres. Against a swarm of incoming drones, a human who approves every shot individually is too slow. And since the 1980s warships have carried defensive guns that detect and engage incoming missiles on their own.

The line therefore does not run between human and machine. It runs between defending against a projectile and selecting a human being. A machine that shoots down a missile flying at a ship decides about a thing. A machine that decides in a street who is a combatant decides about a life, and no one answers for it any more. Exactly this distinction was at stake in Geneva with the formula of “meaningful human control”. And exactly this distinction the United States did not want to write down.

VII. How This Essay Could Be Refuted

The first objection: China and Russia are developing autonomous weapons anyway. Whoever restrains themselves alone loses. This must be taken seriously. But it is an argument for a rule that binds everyone, not against it. Whoever uses this argument and at the same time weakens the negotiations on such a rule does not want the rule.

The second objection: machines might make fewer mistakes in war than exhausted, frightened soldiers. People have committed massacres that no machine would ever commit. That too is true. But it concerns only the question of mistakes, not the question of responsibility and not that of the lever. A soldier who commits a massacre can be put on trial. A soldier who refuses can bring down a ruler. A machine can do neither.

The third objection: nobody understands this technology better than those who build it. Whom else should one ask? One should ask them. But whoever is asked advises. Whoever leads decides. That is the difference at stake.

The essay would be refuted if the results of Project Meridian show no preference for the products of the companies that lead it. The test is coming soon. The report has been announced for 28 January 2027.

VIII. The Box

In the myth Pandora opens the box out of curiosity, and when she closes the lid again, all evil is already in the world. Only hope remains inside. The signatories of 2017 knew what they were talking about. This time the box is not opened out of curiosity, but on commission, with a deadline and a budget, by someone who warned against it.

When the soldier who does not shoot is replaced by a machine that always shoots: who will still say no?