When AI Goes to War With Itself: What a Nuclear Crisis Simulation Reveals About AI Decision-Making
A King's College London Study Put Three AI Models in a Nuclear Crisis. None of Them Ever Backed Down.
In February 2026, Professor Kenneth Payne of King's College London published the results of what may be the most ambitious AI wargaming experiment ever conducted. His study, titled AI Arms and Influence, placed three of the world's most advanced large language models—OpenAI's GPT-5.2, Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4, and Google's Gemini 3 Flash—on opposing sides of simulated nuclear crises and let them play out the consequences over 21 games and 329 turns.