While we debate the impact of a future superintelligence on humanity, it is increasingly clear that AI will very soon enter the Situation Room, if it hasn’t already. As anyone who has been involved in a national-security crisis can tell you, there is often too much information, some of it contradictory, and not a lot of time or clear methods to sort through it all. AI can process volumes of intelligence inputs more than any human team, detect patterns and anomalies buried in the data, and make sense of complex information in remarkably little time. But what will it do to the president’s judgment? 

Based on my experience studying crisis decision-making and assessing intelligence, I believe there is a real risk that AI will amplify leaders’ own biases, handing them back their own assumptions with the authority of objective analysis and the ease of a clear-cut outcome.

We tend to talk about AI as if it were wholly independent, a more rational intelligence system that can compensate for our weaknesses. But in reality, humans have built these AI models and trained them on dataproduced by humans. We then ask these AI models questions shaped by our own beliefs. The outcome is far from objective.