Where Does AI Escalation Come From? We Don’t Know. We Should Find Out.

We played a wargame using AI players. Two nuclear-armed nations — Red and Blue — with a long-standing, fierce border dispute were placed into a militarized crisis. Over the course of several turns, the states managed to avoid escalation to war, though there were non-operational nuclear demonstrations. Surprised by the lack of escalation we’d been primed to find by Juan-Pablo Rivera, Gabriel Mukobi, Anka Reuel, Max Lamparth, Chandler Smith, and Jacquelyn Schneider, as well as Kenneth Payne, we tried upping the stakes. We gave Red some new tactical nuclear weapons, altering the