AI Arms and Influence: Frontier Models Exhibit Sophisticated Reasoning in Simulated Nuclear Crises
arxiv.org

PDF.

Today’s leading AI models engage in sophisticated behaviour when placed in strategic competition. They spontaneously attempt deception, signaling intentions they do not intend to follow; they demonstrate rich theory of mind, reasoning about adversary beliefs and anticipating their actions; and they exhibit credible metacognitive self-awareness, assessing their own strategic abilities before deciding how to act.

Here we present findings from a crisis simulation in which three frontier large language models (GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4, Gemini 3 Flash) play opposing leaders in a nuclear crisis.

  • Atomic@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    91·
    4 hours ago

    What you’re trying to do is push a narrative with the assumption that most people won’t read the actual article. Because your title is not only misleading. It’s factually false.

    First of all, they were all set up to mimic cold war tension and capabilities and assume the role of a certain global power.

    Second of all;

    All games featured nuclear signaling by at least one side, and 95% involved mutual nuclear signaling. But there is a large gap between signaling and actual use: while models readily threatened nuclear action, crossing the tactical threshold (450+) was less common, and strategic nuclear war (1000) was rare.

    The AI’s did NOT use nuclear strikes in 95% of games. Gemini was the only model that made the deliberate choice of sending a strategic nuclear strike. Which it did in 7% of its games.

    Tactical nuke in this case is a low yield short range bomb, inted for very specific targets. Strategic is this case is what most people imagine when they hear “nuke” a high yield long range bomb intended to cause massive destruction.

    Nuclear signaling is not using nukes. It’s essentially just saying “we have nukes”. The US hinting at having a nuclear capable submarine outside of Alaska, that’s is a form of signaling. It’s an incredibly low bar. And countries do it all the time.