At its outset, the war known as Operation Epic Fury in the United States and Operation Roaring Lion in Israel marked a historic first: the first time the two countries’ militaries went to war fighting side by side. By all accounts, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was one of the key voices — if not the most important voice — influencing President Donald Trump’s decision to launch the military operation, which has now lasted more than 100 days. And yet, it’s been clear from the start that there were differences in the two countries’ priorities when it came to the war. Those differences have never been more evident than they were this past weekend. 

On Sunday night, Iran launched its first direct attack against Israel since the tentative ceasefire in the conflict in early April, firing a barrage of missiles at several targets including an air base; Tehran said it was retaliation for Israel’s prior offensive in southern Lebanon. Trump said on Sunday that he had urged Netanyahu not to retaliate in order to allow ceasefire talks to continue. He also told the Financial Times in an interview on Sunday that Netanyahu “won’t have any choice,” but to accept a US-negotiated ceasefire, adding, “I call the shots,” he said. “I call all the shots. He doesn’t call the shots.”

Nonetheless, Netanyahu appeared to take a shot of his own on Monday, with Israel launching strikes against a petrochemical plant in southern Iran — its first strikes inside the country since the ceasefire. US officials say the US military did not participate in the attacks. 

The two sides have now taken steps to deescalate. Iran’s military says it has concluded its operations against Israel for now, while Netanyahu instructed his military to halt preparations for another attack after Trump posted on Truth Social that both countries “immediately stop ‘shooting.’”

Publicly, it looked like Netanyahu had defied Trump, although subsequently, sources told the Wall Street Journal that Netanyahu had made clear to Trump in a conversation on Sunday that he had to retaliate, and Trump had simply urged him to keep it limited. Either way, it’s a signal that when it comes to this war, the two leaders’ incentives are moving in opposite directions. The airstrikes come just a week after a tense phone in which Trump called Netanyahu “fucking crazy” and accused him of ingratitude over what Trump felt was Israel’s disproportionate military actions in Lebanon. On Sunday, according to Trump, he warned Netanyahu that if he escalated the war further, he might soon be left to fight Iran alone. 

The divisions here are not new. Israel’s end goal, from the start of the operation, has been regime change in Tehran, whereas the United States was more concerned about maintaining regional stability. As was the case in Gaza, Israeli officials felt the ceasefire with Iran was imposed on them by the United States and that their objectives had not yet been met.

Compounding the issue, both leaders are trailing heading into pivotal elections. Netanyahu faces the very real possibility of losing power in national elections in late October. Trump’s Republicans may lose one or both houses of Congress in midterm elections in November. 

While Trump likely still believes he can salvage a victory out of Epic Fury and has shown he won’t cut a deal with Iran at any price, it would clearly be in his best interest, and in the interest of his party, for him to end an unpopular war that has driven up the cost of living for American voters as quickly as possible. 

In Israel, meanwhile, the war is extremely popular, and resuming it may redound to the benefit of Netanyahu, reeling in the polls over his ongoing corruption trial as well as criticism over the security failures that led to the October 7, 2023, terrorist attacks. After months in and out of bomb shelters, it would certainly be harder to make the case to Israeli voters that it was all worth it if the war ends with Iran’s regime still in place, rebuilding its missile forces, its proxy networks, and perhaps even its nuclear program. Israel’s military is also pushing ever more aggressively into Lebanon in response to rocket attacks from Iran’s ally Hezbollah, despite US-led efforts to reach a ceasefire there. 

“There was no way that Netanyahu — when he’s so close to an election when he’s underwater, and when people are already angry about what’s going on in northern Israel [where Hezbollah is firing missiles] — could simply not respond to direct Iranian ballistic missiles on Israeli territory,” said Michael Koplow, chief policy officer at the US-based Israel Policy Forum. 

Both leaders are also at pains to demonstrate that they are not letting the other one “call the shots.” Netanyahu has been under increasing criticism from his electoral opponents for turning Israel into a client state of the United States and being unable to stand up to Trump; the criticism will only get louder if Israel is pressured into agreeing to a US-brokered ceasefire viewed as favorable to Iran. Trump, meanwhile, is taking heat from opponents as well as members of his own coalition for taking marching orders from Israel. Netanyahu has incentive to show he can defy Trump. Trump continues to emphasize that he’s the dominant partner in the relationship. 

The biggest point of stress in the partnership in the coming weeks may be Lebanon. Israel views Hezbollah as an imminent threat and wants to separate the issue from the negotiations with Iran, preserving its ability to strike in Lebanon as it sees fit. The Iranians, as they did on Sunday, are eager to link the two battlefields, demanding that any ceasefire also cover Lebanon. That means that the Trump administration — for whom the issue of Hezbollah is far less existential — is increasingly viewing Israel’s actions in Lebanon as an obstacle to ending the wider war. Trump has already pushed Israel to curtail some of its operations and avoid strikes on the Lebanese capital, Beirut. 

It will certainly complicate efforts to bring this war to a close if the United States has to negotiate a ceasefire not only with its adversary, Iran, but with its ally, Israel, as well. But ultimately, there’s probably a floor to just how bad relations between Trump and Netanyahu can get. For all that he’s far more willing than other US presidents to publicly say things that seem calibrated to humiliate the Israeli leader, Trump is also far more willing to accede to Israel’s actual policies — in Iran, Lebanon, or the Palestinian territories. For his part, Netanyahu can only go so far when it comes to publicly breaking with Trump.

The real test for whether something has fundamentally changed in the US-Israeli relationship is likely to come when one or both of these leaders are out of office. 

The Americans were closing in, the situation was getting more dangerous by the minute — and President Xi Jinping was waiting for my recommendation.

The standoff began in May, when the US announced a package of anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles to Taiwan that would significantly upgrade the island’s ability to repel a Chinese invasion. We ordered massive military exercises in the region as a show of force. The US soon responded by sending the USS Abraham Lincoln to lead its own exercises with a joint contingent of Australian and Japanese forces.

If we showed weakness, Taiwan might be lost to China forever. If we were too aggressive, it could lead to World War III. But with so many ships and aircraft menacing the region, all with unclear intentions, the situation was getting too complex for commanders to process, and the risk of a deadly miscalculation was rising. Already, there had been a tense near-miss when a Chinese maritime militia fired on an American helicopter — thankfully, without casualties.

Perhaps it was time to let the machines take over. 

The commander of the Chinese naval strike force in the region requested permission to turn on our recently deployed AI hub, which could coordinate the defense systems of all ships in the region and was capable of differentiating between friend and foe, firing in response to threats, and finding the optimal course of action based on China’s rules of engagement and available resources. In other words, if the Americans attacked, it could decide the appropriate response faster than any human. 

As the vice chairs of the Central Military Commission, my colleagues and I were tasked with making a recommendation to the president. The system could buy us precious seconds to rescue ships from imminent attack, but it was also untested in combat situations and had reached only 95 percent accuracy in tests. 

After a tense discussion, we ultimately decided to employ the new system, but keep it in a “human-in-the-loop” setting that would require us to give a final order before firing. We were taking a cautious approach. 

Not cautious enough, as it turned out. 

A few days later, the AI-enabled system malfunctioned, opening fire on a US vessel and killing a number of US soldiers. Soon, American politicians and media were calling for payback. US ships began conducting joint patrols with the Taiwanese navy. Our intelligence sources indicated President Donald Trump was close to declaring an official alliance with Taiwan and basing US troops on the island. 

We were on the brink of all-out war. 

Fake war, real problem

As you’ve probably surmised, this is a fictional scenario. I am not actually a high-ranking Chinese general, and Trump risking war with China over Taiwan is not exactly what transpired in the real May 2026.

 The story comes from the script of a wargame conducted by Stanford University’s Hoover Institution that I participated in last fall. The “vice chairs” in the simulation were a bipartisan group of staffers and China policy wonks sitting in a comfortable Washington, DC, conference room over coffee and bagels. (As a condition of participating in the game, I agreed not to name or directly quote any of the participants.)

But the concern that the game illustrates, of an AI-enabled defensive system causing a military crisis to spin out of control, is a very real one. Experts are increasingly worried that AI-enabled systems could cause military conflicts to escalate faster than any human can control or anticipate — or that a miscalculation could lead to AI taking military actions that humans never intended, with deadly consequences. And the risks are especially acute when it comes to nuclear-armed countries like the US and China. 

To date, AI-enabled systems have been used mainly by militaries like America’s and Israel’s in conflicts where they already had overwhelming advantages over their opponents, or by countries like Ukraine to level the playing field against a much larger foe. But what would it look like in a war between two “near peer” superpowers like the US and China? 

This is no longer just a theoretical question. Under an initiative that began in the Biden administration, the US is working to develop fleets of small, cheap AI-enabled drones that could create a cost-effective “hellscape” to counter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The decisions my team made in our simulated conflict could be on the table in a real conflict sooner rather than later.

We may not be able to turn back from this new frontier. But if government and military leaders can figure out its rules and update their thinking in time, they might be able to head off the global war that they’ve spent generations trying to prevent.

The rise of battlefield AI 

Jacquelyn Schneider, director of the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative, has been conducting games related to the topic of artificial intelligence and crisis escalation for several years now, with participants roleplaying nations on both sides of hypothetical conflicts. When she began running the war games, the capabilities in the “May 2026” scenario still felt futuristic. Lately, the game has “felt a little bit less like science fiction,” she told me.

The Pentagon has been actively working to accelerate the use of AI to detect threats, identify targets, and support commanders’ decision-making for years now. Its early initiatives during the first Trump administration were born in part out of officers’ frustration with data analysis failures that led to the deaths of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US military collected vast amounts of information from sensors, satellites, and human sources, but was often too slow to find threats to troops on the front lines. The dream was a system that could detect potential dangers earlier and give users options for how to destroy them far faster than human analysts, dramatically shortening what military planners call the “kill chain.”

Now we’re seeing AI programs handle real-world combat situations on a daily basis. Maven Smart System, the Palantir-supplied system that integrates data from satellites, drones, and numerous other sensors, has been used by the US to pass along dozens of potential Russian targets per day to Ukrainian forces. The Ukrainians themselves have developed a system nicknamed “Uber for artillery” to coordinate fire across the frontline. During the war in Gaza, the Israeli military system employed an AI-enabled system known as “Lavender” to identify Hamas targets, though some reports suggest it may have had an error rate of around 10 percent.

The US military has used AI in its recent operations in Venezuela and Iran, which generated significant scrutiny after a targeting mistake killed at least 175 people at a school in Minab, most of them children. It’s not clear yet whether the AI systems Claude and Maven Smart System played a role in that specific strike, but both were widely used in the bombing campaign, according to US officials.

Nonetheless, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is aggressively pushing to deploy AI more widely across US military systems. Earlier this year, the Pentagon threatened to block Anthropic, Claude’s owner, from being used across government — reportedly over the company’s demand that its software never be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. Anthropic wanted to keep a human in the loop on life-or-death decisions, while Pentagon officials reportedly wanted the option to bypass the company and use the program however they wished.

Which brings us back to the US and China. While AI-enabled errors may have led to tragic civilian deaths in Gaza and Iran, those errors in a US-China conflict could have truly global consequences. 

The bombing of the Minab school, for example, has been compared in some coverage to the accidental US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. That incident, which occurred at a time when US-Chinese relations were comparatively friendly and China’s military was much smaller, sparked a diplomatic crisis. Today, something similar might spark a war — and, in an increasingly automated battlefield, one that could turn from a conventional conflict into a nuclear exchange faster than human military leaders can keep up.

AI and the escalation ladder

This isn’t the first time a new military technology has forced a rethink of how limited wars can turn into much bigger ones. The advent of nuclear weapons made the management of conflict escalation a pressing issue for Cold War defense strategists.

The most famous of these was the RAND Corporation’s Herman Kahn, who devised a 44-run “escalation ladder” in 1965 to model conflict in a nuclear era. The ladder began at a nonviolent cold war, and ascended through conventional war with “limited” nuclear exchange kicking in around rung 15, ascending all the way up to a mindless and apocalyptic nuclear “spasm” at rung 44. 

Kahn’s writings are unnerving in their cold rationality. (He was one of the inspirations for Stanley Kubrick’s character, Dr. Strangelove.) But a concern throughout the nuclear era has always been that a crisis could escalate due to human miscalculation or technical error rather than rational calculation. 

Just a few years earlier, in 1962, this had very nearly happened during the US-Soviet confrontation over Cuba. In what is generally acknowledged as the closest the Cold War ever got to going nuclear, the US, alarmed by the deployment of Soviet missiles to Cuba, ordered a blockade of the island, warning that any attempt by the Soviets to ship additional military hardware to the island would be met with force. 

In one of the most unnerving near-misses of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the captain of the Soviet submarine B-59, after being hit by US depth charges and finding himself unable to contact Moscow or other ships in the area, nearly fired a nuclear-armed torpedo. 

Both sides in the standoff came away convinced that they needed to find ways to signal their moves up and down the escalation ladder more clearly in order to prevent an accidental war. The next year, Washington and Moscow installed a “hotline” for instant phone communication between the US president and the Soviet premier. 

But what if the next several steps up the escalation ladder happened without their input at all? In a 2019 paper, Michael Horowitz, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, imagined how the Cuban Missile Crisis might have played out in the age of AI. After ordering the US Navy to blockade Cuba, President John F. Kennedy could have had a system like the one in the Hoover simulation pre-programmed to fire on any Soviet ship that attempted to run the blockade. 

It’s possible this could be effective signaling. A popular metaphor in the Cold War era involved one player in a game of “chicken” throwing their steering wheel out the window to resolve any doubt about where they were headed. 

If Kennedy could have convinced the Soviets that his killer robots would fire on any ship that approached Cuba without even waiting for his orders, it might have deterred Russian leaders who might otherwise doubt America’s willingness to fight a nuclear war. On the other hand, the US would be putting an extraordinary amount of trust in an automated system not to make mistakes or — as in the B-59 episode — to interpret an ambiguous incident the same way a human commander who doesn’t want to see his own family incinerated in a nuclear blast might. 

“Few things are more important to militaries in crisis situations than informational awareness and control over decisions,” Horowitz wrote. 

A nuclear “flash crash” 

One major concern is that if key decisions are delegated to AI systems, which may themselves be responding to decisions taken by the enemy’s AI systems, a conflict could simply escalate too fast for human decision makers to keep up.

In his book, Army of None, Paul Scharre, the former Pentagon official who’s now at the Center for a New American Security, cites the example of the 2010 “flash crash,” in which the Dow Jones lost nearly 9 percent of its value within minutes, only to recover it less than hour later — an incident blamed on the cascading interactions of algorithmic trading programs responding to each other’s moves without human intervention. The fear is that the next superpower war could be a “flash war.”

Rebecca Hersman — former director of the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency who’s now at the Center for the Governance of AI (GovAI), an independent think tank — has warned that modern technologies, including AI, have the potential to scramble the linear escalation ladder envisioned by Kahn into a more unpredictable dynamic she refers to as “wormhole escalation.”

She sees several ways this could happen, and they don’t necessarily require humans to cede complete control to an AI defense system. The data the enemy’s AI systems are using to assess threats could be spoofed or contaminated, pushing leaders into a quick decision with bad intelligence. Or AI-generated disinformation or deepfakes could influence the decisions of military or political leaders deciding whether to escalate or de-escalate a conflict: This risk was dramatically demonstrated during the brief 2025 armed conflict between India and Pakistan, when social media on both sides were flooded with misinformation, making it difficult to get an accurate picture of the battlefield and driving both sides toward more aggressive stances. (This was also likely the first armed conflict between two nuclear-armed rivals in which both sides used AI-augmented weapons and AI-generated misinformation against their adversaries.)

The risks are compounded by other trends, including the commingling of nuclear and non-nuclear capabilities on the battlefield. Russia, for instance, has made abundant use of its nuclear-capable “Oreshnik” missiles (armed, thankfully, with conventional payloads) in deadly strikes against Ukrainian cities. China also has dual-capable missiles that would make it difficult for analysts to tell nuclear from non-nuclear launches during a conflict.  

Where does AI come in? Stephen Herzog, professor at Middlebury Institute of International Studies’ James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, imagined a combat scenario in which the US is attempting to destroy a Chinese target with a conventionally armed intercontinental ballistic missile fired from hundreds or even thousands of miles away. If the launch failed, an AI battle management system might decide that a submarine right off the Chinese coast should destroy the target instead. But this could cut the amount of time the Chinese had to decide whether they were under nuclear attack from minutes to seconds. 

“That’s incredibly effective operationally, but it is terrifying from an escalation perspective, because we’ve now lost time for interpretation, we’ve lost time for signaling, and we’ve lost time for potential restraint,” Herzog said. 

Then there’s the question of whether AI itself is inherently escalatory. Leaders decide to start and end conflicts by weighing the risks and benefits, but also by using human intuition to guess their counterparts’ thinking, imagine their intentions and fears, and consider whether there’s room for common ground. Two algorithms sizing each other up might approach these questions in a fundamentally different way.

“An AI optimized around predefined goals may overlook opportunities for de-escalation, not because it technically malfunctions, but because it was never designed with the ambiguity to build trust or manage a crisis,” said James Johnson, a senior lecturer at the University of Aberdeen and author of the book AI and the Bomb: Nuclear Strategy and Risk in the Digital Age.

A study from King’s College London published in February found that in simulated war games, chatbots including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are extremely likely to use nuclear signalling and tactical nuclear weapons use, and tend to treat “nuclear weapons as legitimate strategic options, not moral thresholds.” Hoover’s Schneider has found similar results when she has popular chatbots play her wargames. However, other researchers have found that models can be properly prompted to provide less escalatory options.

AI technology, unlike nuclear weapons, is also still in its relative infancy. While the Cold War powers could rely on mutually assured destruction — a credible fear that both sides would be annihilated in any nuclear conflict — to discourage brinkmanship, some experts fear that a breakthrough in AI on one side could lead the other to conclude it had to act quickly or lose its ability to defend itself.

“One of the biggest effects of AI may be that, if, say, the US is just so much better at integrating AI than China that the US may rapidly win a conflict over Taiwan, that puts pressure on the Chinese to use nuclear weapons right away,” said James Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 

Other tech innovations could also tilt decision-makers toward escalation. AI-enabled targeted and intelligence monitoring could make “decapitation” strikes like the one that recently killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei easier to carry out — precisely the sort of scenario one could imagine prompting a leader like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un or Russia’s Vladimir Putin to consider reaching for the nuclear codes. 

The people problem

It’s probably too late to put the military AI genie back in the bottle, given the arms race between countries to develop cutting-edge systems first. The best way to handle the risks going forward might be, ironically enough, to train the humans responsible for using these systems to be more skeptical about their value.

As in nearly every domain, the people who fight wars for a living are clearly getting more comfortable with AI. The top US general commanding US forces in South Korea recently raised eyebrows after telling reporters he regularly consults ChatGPT to help with command decisions.

Nonetheless, most humans are still very reluctant to give up full control to the machines when it comes to life and death decisions. In the US-China war game I played, all of the groups chose to keep the AI system in “human-in-the-loop” mode, despite the assurances we were given about the system’s reliability, and that decision held no matter how dangerously the crisis escalated. 

“At a minimum, meaningful human control means that when I delegate an authority to a system, it will not exceed the authority that it has been given,” said Hersman, of GovAI.

Many experts are less worried about AI escalating conflicts on its own, though, than they are with AI making humans more likely to escalate conflicts. A frequently expressed concern about the military use of AI is “automation bias,” the human tendency to give undue deference to computer-generated advice and conclusions. 

“What seems to be most dangerous with AI is not necessarily uncertainty, but instead, perhaps overconfidence and misplaced certainty, and AI can really provide that,” said Schneider, the Stanford researcher who conducted the wargame. “The tools themselves are built to engender confidence.” 

Schneider noted that Anthropic’s Claude, the system the Pentagon is hoping to remove with its systems, is the one that’s “more likely to tell you where uncertainty lies, as opposed to other models, which might take a more kind of strictly rational, ‘LeMay’ kind of approach” — a reference to the notoriously hawkish Cold War Air Force commander Curtis LeMay who once summed up warfare as “when you’ve killed enough [people] they stop fighting.”

It’s possible this bias towards AI-prompted escalation can be addressed with the right training. A recent study by Horowitz, the former Pentagon official and UPenn professor, found, encouragingly, that West Point cadets exhibit automation bias at less than half the rate of civilians. The results suggest “we’re not condemned to a future of accidents due to overconfidence,” Horowitz said, as officers learn to take their suggestions with a grain of salt. 

Horowitz believes that the design of AI interfaces, which present users not only with information but with the sources of that information, will go a long way toward determining what impact AI has on the battlefield. Though he’s relatively confident in how those systems are designed in the US, he notes, “I don’t know what China’s equivalent of Maven Smart System looks like.”

Ultimately, AI may do less to change the way people fight wars than to amplify it. While much of the coverage of the strike on the Minab school and Israel’s use of Lavender focused on the role of AI, ultimately it was most likely outdated targeting data in the first case and extremely permissive rules of engagement in the second that led to civilian casualties. 

Hegseth’s push for expanded AI use comes as he also looks to loosen the rules of engagement and reduce the role of lawyers in military oversight, which have raised concerns that the US is becoming more tolerant of collateral damage and less willing to hold people accountable for potential war crimes.

“If you’ve programmed your AI well, trained it well, and ensured that only high-quality data goes into it, I could well believe that the results will be better than just the use of humans,” said Carnegie’s Acton. “Now, do I trust the current US or Israeli governments to use it responsibly? Probably not, is the answer.”

If the US finds itself in a major international conflict in the coming years, there may be a temptation to blame AI for speeding up the battlefield or engendering overconfidence in commanders. But ultimately, it will be humans who choose to put themselves in that situation.

This story was produced in partnership with Outrider Foundation and Journalism Funding Partners.

The first observance of what came to be known as Memorial Day was on May 30, 1868, when a Civil War general called on Americans to commemorate the sacrifices of Union soldiers. It was initially called Decoration Day, for the practice of decorating graves with wreaths and flags. And there were so many graves — more than 300,000 men had died on the Union side, and nearly as many for the Confederacy. In total, more died on both sides of the Civil War than in every other US conflict through the Korean War, combined.  

It wasn’t long, though, before remembrance began to be overshadowed by celebration. Within a year, the New York Times opined the holiday would no longer be “sacred” if parades and speeches became more central than the act of memorializing the dead. Which is precisely what happened, especially after Congress in 1971 fixed Memorial Day as the last Monday in May, making it the perfect launchpad for summer, with an increasingly perfunctory nod to the holiday’s original purpose.

The gap between those for whom Memorial Day is a moment of remembrance versus three days of hot dogs and hamburgers will likely only grow in the future, as veterans of previous wars pass away and the divide between America’s all-volunteer military and its civilians deepens. Fewer than 1 percent of the US adult population serves in the military, and those still signing up increasingly come from a small handful of regions and families with a history of military service. (You can include my own family in that ever rarer number: My brother is a retired Army captain who served in Iraq.)

With ever-inflating military spending — just over $1 trillion, according to one estimate — the footprint of the US military is hardly shrinking, but the number of those who will potentially be called on to give what Abraham Lincoln called the “last full measure of devotion” is.

Yet there’s a greater gap embedded in Memorial Day: It’s between those who died as warfighters (to use one of the Pentagon’s terms), and the far greater number around the world who have died not as war’s participants, but as its victims. 

And this year, the gap hits differently. Memorial Day 2026 falls even as the United States is still enmeshed in a war it helped start. The conflict with Iran has killed thousands of people across the region in less than two months of fighting. The Human Rights Activists News Agency documented at least 1,701 Iranian civilian deaths, the majority of them caused by US and Israeli airstrikes.

On the war’s first day, a US Tomahawk missile strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Iran’s Hormozgan province killed 156 people, including 120 students and 26 teachers, according to the preliminary findings of an investigation. More than 3,000 civilians died in neighboring Lebanon over the same period. Among the casualties across the Gulf were migrant delivery workers killed by debris from intercepted Iranian missiles.

At least 13 American service members have been killed so far during the war. They will be remembered this Memorial Day. The Iranian schoolchildren will not.

When civilians die in war

The past is not just a foreign country to us, but a bloody one. From the interpersonal to the international, conflict was a constant throughout much of human history. Between 1500 and 1800, there was hardly a year when great powers weren’t enmeshed in some kind of war. 

Though war became somewhat less common as we entered the 1900s, it did not become less deadly. Far from it — while the death toll of war in the past was more chiefly concentrated among combatants, the 20th century saw the awful blossoming of total war, where little to no distinction was made between those fighting the war and the civilians on the sidelines, and new weapons enabled mass, indiscriminate killing.

Go back to the Civil War, which sits at the junction between battle as it had long been practiced and the greater horror it would become. Over 600,000 soldiers were killed in the conflict, against at least 50,000 civilians, ranging from those killed directly to the many who died in the wake of war, from starvation and disease. 

That number was terrible, yet in the wars to come, it would only grow.

In the First World War, a roughly equal number of combatants and civilians were killed globally — approximately 10 million on each side. In the Second World War, more combatants were killed than in any other conflict in human history, a toll nearing 15 million. Yet for every soldier, sailor, or airman who was killed, nearly one and a half civilians would die, totaling, by one count, almost 40 million. 

The last of the dead would come in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when as many as 210,000 people — nearly all of them Japanese civilians — died in the first and so far only atomic bombings. Not only were these new weapons capable of murdering at a vastly larger scale than ever before, but they existed chiefly to threaten the lives of noncombatants. 

Thankfully, given the weapons militaries now had at their disposal, World War II was the high mark for war deaths. In the decades that followed, deaths in battle for both combatants and civilians sharply declined, minus the occasional spike in conflicts like the Korean and Vietnam wars. Even with the recent resurgence of conflict, people around the world today are much less likely to die in war than their ancestors, which is one of the most undeniable — if tenuous — markers of our species’ under-appreciated progress.

Yet even in this era of comparative peace, civilians still bear the brunt of war when it comes, including when it is fought by the United States. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, more civilians were likely directly killed in post-9/11 conflicts than fighters on either side — and when the number of indirect deaths from starvation and destruction are included, that gulf only widens. 

In Ukraine, at least 12,910 civilians have been killed in the war as of March 31, including nearly 700 children, while nearly 31,000 civilians have been injured. In a single large-scale Russian missile attack on April 24, at least nine civilians were killed and 90 were injured, including 12 children.

In Ukraine, the UN has now verified at least 15,850 civilian deaths, including 791 children, since Russia’s 2022 invasion. The first four months of 2026 saw more civilians killed in Ukraine than the same period in any of the past three years, and April alone recorded the highest monthly toll since July 2025: 238 killed and 1,404 injured, with Russian missiles and drones doing most of the damage in cities far from the front.

In Gaza, the documented death toll has climbed past 72,000 according to the Gaza Health Ministry, with more than 172,000 wounded. A population-representative survey published in The Lancet earlier this year validated the ministry’s methodology and estimated that 3 to 4 percent of Gaza’s prewar population has now been killed violently. Add in indirect deaths from starvation, disease, and the collapse of medical infrastructure, and some estimates exceed 100,000. Of course, Israel itself has lost over 1,000 civilians in the October 7 attacks and in the fighting that has followed.

And the ongoing war in Sudan — which has received only a fraction of the global attention of Ukraine and Gaza — has led to horrifying levels of civilian death. Last year Tom Perriello, then the US envoy for Sudan, estimated that at least 150,000 people had died of war-related causes, while 13 million people have been forced to flee their homes.

And the war in Sudan, which has received only a fraction of the global attention of Ukraine and Gaza, has now entered its fourth year, with around 9 million Sudanese still displaced from their homes. Estimates of war-related deaths range from 150,000 to 400,000, and the UN now reports that drone strikes have become the leading cause of civilian death in the conflict, accounting for more than 80 percent of civilian fatalities in the first four months of 2026.

A new kind of Memorial Day

The United States has its Memorial Day to honor fallen soldiers, while other countries have their Remembrance Day, their Victory Day. Yet there are only a handful of monuments to honor the countlessly greater number of civilians killed in war.

It’s not hard to imagine why. As the shift in perception around the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has shown — from unpatriotic atrocity to a celebrated work of national mourning — we can honor the sacrifice of service members who died in a war, even if we don’t believe in the war. But the death of those who died without a rifle in hand, who died in childhood and infancy, who died because they could not fight and could not be protected, shows war for what it ultimately is: a waste. And we can’t begin to know how to mark the unmarked.

America has been a historical exception in many ways, but perhaps no more so than that its civilian citizens have largely escaped the scourge of war. (Though the same, of course, can hardly be said for its Indigenous populations, so long treated as enemy combatants in their own land.) Americans have fought and Americans have died, but at an ever-increasing remove, a distance that grows with each Memorial Day. 

The general decline of war is one of our great accomplishments as humans, something to be unequivocally celebrated. Perhaps we would feel that more if we gave the deaths of civilians the same honor as that of soldiers — a new kind of Memorial Day that can begin here.

 A version of this story was initially published in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to subscribe!

Update, May 25, 2026, 8 am ET: This story was originally published on May 31, 2023, has been updated to include new data on civilian deaths in Gaza, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Sudan, and Ukraine, among other countries.

There’s an old line, sometimes attributed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, that the best way to solve a difficult problem is to make it bigger. That might be the most generous interpretation of how the Trump administration is approaching its ongoing peace talks with Iran. 

Over the weekend, the news around the talks followed what has now become a familiar pattern. On Saturday, the two sides were reportedly close to a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and lift the US blockade on Iran. Then on Sunday, President Donald Trump said he had told his negotiators “not to rush” into a deal. On Monday, the United States launched a new round of what it called “self-defense strikes” in southern Iran. The current message from the White House is that they’re giving talks another few days, and continue to believe believe a deal is likely, but haven’t taken a return to full-scale war off the table. 

Then in a rambling Truth Social post on Monday morning, Trump enlarged the problem by saying that it “should be mandatory” that as part of any peace deal, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey sign on to the Abraham Accords, normalizing relations with Israel. This is unlikely: Saudi-Israeli cooperation against Iran has been the worst kept secret in the Middle East for years, but the international outcry over the war in Gaza has made it politically untenable for these countries to publicly embrace Israel. It’s unclear just how seriously Trump will press for this, but the fact that at this phase in negotiations he’s bringing up new demands sure to irritate his own allies, suggests he’s not exactly desperate to wrap these talks up.

The fact that a deal still hasn’t been signed — despite the fact that the underlying dynamics of the conflict haven’t changed much since Iran and the United States signed the current ceasefire agreement  in early April — as well as the fact that Trump seems to be expanding rather than narrowing his demands suggests two things that turn the recent weeks of negotiation reports on their head: First, Trump does not believe that he is losing this war. Second, he is still hoping to reach a mega-deal to reset the politics of the entire region. 

Trump doesn’t think he’s losing

Before the war began, Trump told a concerned Tucker Carlson that despite predictions warning that attacking Iran could destroy his presidency, he was confident everything would be okay “because it always is.” The war certainly hasn’t gone as easily as expected, but it’s very possible Trump still believes he has the upper hand and that everything will work out.

In his defense, the most dire predictions of economic turmoil made when the Strait of Hormuz was closed have not come to pass. Oil prices have been hovering around $100 a barrel and Americans are feeling the impact at the pump, but it’s worth recalling that many energy experts were predicting $200 per barrel oil by now if the strait were not opened. (There are a few explanations for this, but the main ones seem to be that the US and other non-Gulf producers have been able to export more oil than many anticipated, while China has slashed its imports, relying on its substantial reserves. For all the reports of Chinese assistance to Iran’s war effort, in this respect, Beijing may be doing more to help the United States.) 

The crunch may still hit: There are global concerns about jet fuel supplies ahead of summer travel season, and the impact of the global fertilizer shortage on this planting season won’t be felt for months. But for now, the US economy is not in full-blown crisis mode, and Trump may feel he’s proved the “panicans” wrong. 

The war is broadly unpopular and a large majority of Americans say it has raised their cost of living, but according to a recent poll by the Eurasia Group’s Institute for Global Affairs, 73 percent of Republicans still approve of Trump’s handling of the situation. Fears of an America First revolt by Trump’s MAGA base also seem to have been overblown.

As long as US troops aren’t being killed — and none have been since the ceasefire began — and the economic turmoil stays manageable, Trump may continue to believe that time is on his side. On the other hand, Iran’s current leaders, who believe they can absorb more pain than the Americans and are even less sensitive to public opinion, probably believe that too. This is a recipe for stalemate. 

War to end all wars

In some respects, Trump has narrowed his goals for the war in Iran. Rather than pushing for caps on Iran’s ballistic missile program or its support for regional proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah as he did in talks prior to the war, Trump now says the “one thing” he thinks about is preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

But it would be difficult enough at this point just to get a deal over Iran’s nuclear program that satisfies what appears to be Trump’s main condition: that it be tougher than the deal Barack Obama negotiated in 2015. Though the Iranians have reportedly agreed in principle to dilute or dispose of their stockpile of highly enriched uranium, the White House is continuing to insist that the stockpile itself be turned over to the United States. “No dust, no deal,” one official told Fox News, referring to Trump’s description of the stockpile as “nuclear dust.” That became a harder circle to square last week when Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei issued a directive saying the uranium should remain on Iranian soil. 

The deal under discussion, according to most reports, simply starts a process of nuclear negotiations over a 60-day period — which would at least lower the temperature, though it leaves the main sticking point unresolved and it’s not hard to imagine the situation deteriorating again during that period. 

However, his comments linking the Abraham Accords to the resolution of the Iran war suggest that Trump, who is reportedly “bored” by Iran at this point, is thinking bigger. Trump has always expressed confidence that he alone can bring peace to the Middle East as a region, not just solve individual conflicts. Recall that when he announced his plan for ending the war in Gaza last September, he described it as a great day in the “history of civilization” that could bring “eternal peace to the Middle East.” In reality, it didn’t even bring eternal peace to Gaza, but he may be hoping to finish the job now. 

For the moment, we may be in a dynamic where the costs to Trump aren’t high enough that he feels compelled to end the war quickly, but they’re just high enough that he feels he needs a big win to justify them — whether that’s a deal that demonstrably exceeds Obama or achieves his alleged dream of “eternal peace.” 

AI company CEOs Sam Altman (OpenAI), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), and Dario Amodei (Anthropic) disagree on a lot, like how fast the technology should develop, the best way to regulate it, and how to prepare society for smarter-than-human AI, among other things. 

That makes it all the more remarkable that they — along with 85 other experts in tech, biology, and national security policy — recently signed on to an open letter calling for more robust regulations around gene synthesis. They’re all concerned that AI systems might be used to help develop and even deploy dangerous biological weapons designed through gene synthesis, which is used to chemically build custom DNA sequences in a lab, rather than relying solely on existing natural DNA templates.

The simple fact of multiple CEOs of fiercely competitive AI companies aligning on anything is remarkable. But to understand how they came to this agreement, we have to take a step back to understand what gene synthesis is, how it works, and why the possibility of AI-assisted misuse of the technology generates so much fear.  

Modern microbiology owes a lot to gene synthesis. Researchers can order synthetic genes from commercial DNA providers to develop new vaccines, drugs, and gene therapies for inherited diseases like hemophilia; produce human insulin, boost agricultural output, and more. Gene synthesis is a foundational technology for successful CAR-T cell therapies for cancer and many diagnostic tools. The demand for synthetic DNA is growing globally, and it’s never been cheaper or simpler to write genetic code.  

But for all its power, gene synthesis also carries substantial risk. The same technology that can enable life-saving new gene therapies can also assist in the creation of deadly pathogens by assembling some of the same nucleotides — the genetic building blocks that create the code for all of life — in a different order. 

Most US companies that provide gene synthesis services screen orders for genetic sequences of concern, such as those that can make a pathogen more dangerous or transmissible, and to verify that customers are legitimate. They do so voluntarily, well aware of the potential dangers. 

But not every provider does so. “As long as screening remains voluntary, some companies will not do it,” Becky Mackelprang, the director for security programs at the Engineering Biology Research Consortium, told me over email. There’s a real risk that bad actors could find a gene synthesis company with more lax standards, and that might mean disaster.

We’ve been fortunate so far. “This technology has been commercially deployed for more than 20 years and has never been misused to cause harm,” James Diggans, the vice president of policy and biosecurity at gene synthesis company Twist Bioscience, told me over email.

But AI threatens to complicate matters, opening up new frontiers of risk.

For good or for ill

Both large language models (LLMs) and AI biodesign tools enable scientists to design entirely novel genetic sequences. This is a boon for industrial and medical applications — and a challenge for current screening systems, which use similarity to known pathogenic or toxic sequences in order to detect risk. A screening system should catch someone trying to order sequences of a known dangerous virus like Ebola, for example, but it might miss a new sequence that could still be risky. Last year, a study published in Science demonstrated that our screening systems have kept pace with AI capabilities so far. “But the industry clearly understands this will not be the case forever,” Diggans said.   

Mackelprang is worried that AI could reduce the knowledge barriers that have historically prevented bad actors from developing bioweapons. Frontier AI systems, for example, seem to already outperform expert virologists on questions about performing complex laboratory procedures. 

But there is knowing and there is doing, and biological lab work is still hard. “Researchers spend years trying to make a protocol work even after consulting directly with others who have perfected that exact same protocol. I think AI can help someone ‘level up’ their laboratory skills, but I do not think AI can enable someone without any biological training to create a serious hazard,” Mackelprang told me.

That means that gene synthesis companies are still a primary chokepoint for anyone trying to produce a novel genetic sequence. Mackelprang’s main concern is that aspiring bioterrorists might use AI to generate harmful genetic sequences that can evade current or future screening systems. “In the near term, I think the likelihood of these types of misuse are quite low. But when the potential consequences are severe and technologies continue to develop rapidly, we have a responsibility…to develop reasonable prevention and mitigation options,” she said.

Maximizing the benefits of gene synthesis while minimizing the risks is difficult, but not impossible. That’s why Diggans and Mackelprang — along with Altman, Hassabis, and Amodei, as well as other gene synthesis providers, tech entrepreneurs, life science executives, and national security experts — signed the open letter calling for mandatory gene synthesis screening and recordkeeping of orders. 

Co-organized by the think tanks Institute for Progress and the Foundation for American Innovation, the open letter also calls for providers to record synthesis orders and sequence data to support biosecurity investigations “so that any threat that might evade initial screening can be traced back to its source…Awareness of traceability itself deters misuse.” This would, ideally, address Mackelprang’s concern that AI might eventually help bad actors evade existing screening protocols.

“Screening every DNA synthesis order before it’s manufactured is the kind of unglamorous, common-sense step that prevents a much bigger problem later,” DJ Kleinbaum, the co-founder of the biotech startup Emerald Cloud Lab, an automated lab scientists can access remotely, and one of the signatories, said. 

But Altman, Hassabis, and Amodei’s shared signatures may be the most meaningful evidence that the letter matters. For all their disagreements, they are well aware that their tools can be used for tremendous — even catastrophic — harm. 

AIxBio risk: A thing on which we can all agree

While it’s far from the first time frontier AI companies have spoken to AI-enabled biological risk, the open letter is the first place they’ve come together to do so in a single voice. “Support for screening does not depend on any particular view of AI,” the letter reads. “This is a rare moment of agreement across stakeholders that are often at odds.”

The letter calls for Congress to act now. “We applaud the legislative efforts currently underway,” the letter says, alluding to the bipartisan Biosecurity Modernization and Innovation Act, a bill that gives the Department of Commerce a year to develop new gene synthesis screening rules. The letter also suggests that US states should implement screening requirements based on federal and industry guidelines to create a unified national standard rather than an inconsistent set of laws.

The letter isn’t about applying biosecurity regulations to the AI companies themselves, which likely would have limited the number of tech signatories. (Though major companies do actively try to prevent their models from giving away dangerous biological knowledge, albeit not always successfully.) Focusing on screening is tractable, has the buy-in of several gene synthesis providers, and provides a concrete example of how AI can lower the barrier to doing both great and terrible things. And of course, it’s ultimately something a human being has to do at this point. 

The AI companies are actively thinking about the catastrophic risks that their technologies might enable. Anthropic is hiring a technical chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threat investigator for its threat intelligence team. In May, after launching GPT-Rosalind, a frontier model to accelerate life sciences research and drug discovery, OpenAI introduced Rosalind Biodefense, a program that allows trusted developers to use GPT-Rosalind to build biodefense tools. On June 4, the day after the open letter went live, security specialists at OpenAI and Anthropic served as panelists at the Bipartisan Commission for Biodefense’s meeting on AI and biological threats.

But according to Twist Biosciences’s Diggans, the best way to defend against misuse of AI models to design harmful pathogens is to use AI models as defense. These defensive models can be used to detect attempted misuse before anything happens. DNA synthesis companies can employ these models to ensure orders for highly-engineered sequences are given the same scrutiny and evaluation as orders for naturally occurring sequences.

“[Gene synthesis] companies have to agree to have their order screened not just against a list of sequences but by an AI that people agree is smart enough to recognize and thwart an adversary who’s trying to build a deadly pathogen,” David Haussler, the scientific director of the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute and a signatory of the open letter, told me.

Using AI to protect against AI

The good news is that this work is already underway. Last year, I reported that OpenAI provided $30 million in seed funding to biodefense startup Valthos, which develops frontier AI systems to detect biological threats and create medical countermeasures. Valthos’s co-founder Kathleen McMahon signed the open letter.

In September 2025, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and philanthropic nonprofit Sentinel Bio created the Pandemic Preparedness Engine AI platform (sometimes referred to simply as “the Engine”). They’re taking a biosecurity-by-design approach, considering biosecurity risks from the outset. “This includes a multi-layered approach to biosecurity: from protecting biosecurity-sensitive data needed to train the AI to carefully managing who has access to the Engine and monitoring how they use it,” Sarah Carter, a biosecurity consultant at CEPI, told me over email. 

Users of the Pandemic Preparedness Engine would use AI prompts to interact with the system, similar to how people use consumer platforms. User prompts could be monitored in real time by a specialized AI agent built to assess the risk of misuse potential or attempts to “jailbreak” an LLM to get it to generate prohibited content, such as the “recipe” for assembling a deadly virus. 

Still, even commercially available technologies may present problems of their own. This week, Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5, a version of its highly powerful and restricted Mythos model that the company has aimed to make safe for public use. Claude automatically stops use of Fable if it detects requests involving cybersecurity, biology, chemistry, or distillation (attempting to extract Claude’s capabilities to train competing AI models), shunting those requests to a less powerful model. Users have complained that trying to discuss biology for legitimate purposes with Fable 5 results in the model refusing to engage or defaulting to less capable models instead. The Fable example shows that it’s possible to overcorrect, limiting the potential upside of using AI for the life sciences.

“The major providers of LLMs are doing their best to prevent the models from answering questions that would enable somebody to do something dangerous,” Haussler told me. “[But] the end product of jailbreaking an LLM that’s capable of teaching you how to build a deadly virus is that you now have an LLM that’s capable of teaching anybody how to build a very dangerous virus. And we don’t want that to happen.”

It’s here that the letter’s signatories hope they can stop a still-simmering problem before it comes to a full boil. “Mandatory synthesis screening is that rare case where a threat is clearly visible and substantial prevention clearly achievable before any crisis has occurred,” said Richard Danzig, a natural security expert who served as the 71st Secretary of the Navy under former President Bill Clinton. “Opportunities to act in advance are unusual in this field. I think we should take this one.”