Governing Automated Strategic Intelligence

Nicholas Kruus; Madhavendra Thakur; Adam Khoja; Leonhard Nagel; Maximilian Nicholson; Abeer Sharma; Jason Hausenloy; Alberto KoTafoya; Aliya Mukhanova; Alli Katila-Miikkulainen; Harish Chandran; Ivan Zhang; Jessie Chen; Joel Raj; Jord Nguyen; Lai Hsien Hao; Neja Jayasundara; Soham Sen; Sophie Zhang; Ashley Dora Kokui Tamaklo; Bhavya Thakur; Henry Close; Janghee Lee; Nina Sefton; Raghavendra Thakur; Shiv Munagala; Yeeun Kim

arXiv · 2509.17087

Governing Automated Strategic Intelligence

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Abstract

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.

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Nicholas Kruus, Madhavendra Thakur, Adam Khoja, Leonhard Nagel, Maximilian Nicholson, Abeer Sharma, Jason Hausenloy, Alberto KoTafoya, Aliya Mukhanova, Alli Katila-Miikkulainen, Harish Chandran, Ivan Zhang, Jessie Chen, Joel Raj, Jord Nguyen, Lai Hsien Hao, Neja Jayasundara, Soham Sen, Sophie Zhang, Ashley Dora Kokui Tamaklo, Bhavya Thakur, Henry Close, Janghee Lee, Nina Sefton, Raghavendra Thakur, Shiv Munagala, Yeeun Kim. 2025-09-21. Governing Automated Strategic Intelligence. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17087

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