Palantir's Pentagon Deal Didn't Start the Debate. It Ended One.

Debates about AI and warfare have survived for years on a single structural assumption: that the worst-case scenarios remained future tense. Autonomous targeting, machine-assisted kill chains, accountability gaps in lethal decision-making — critics raised these as risks to be avoided, and advocates could respond that the technology wasn't deployed at scale, that policy guardrails were still being designed, that the future hadn't arrived yet.