The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has awarded contracts to more than two dozen companies to develop autonomous targeting systems for the UK’s armed forces, but critics warn that speeding up targeting decisions with artificial intelligence (AI) will inevitably lead to greater civilian casualties.
In mid-January 2026, the MoD named a group of 26 companies that have been awarded a four-year contract to develop “advanced digital decision-supporting capabilities” as part of its Asgard programme.
Initially announced in October 2024, the MoD has said that Asgard will help it realise the ambitions of the government’s 2025 Strategic defence review, which promised to “deliver a tenfold increase in lethality over the next 10 years” via a combination of enhanced “firepower, surveillance technology, autonomy, digital connectivity and data”.
It added that the Asgard programme “will exploit AI and novel communications networks, providing rapid targeting and decision-support to personnel”, and help the British armed forces “to rapidly find and strike enemy targets at greater distances than ever before”.
Flagged to Computer Weekly by campaign group Drone Wars UK, the contract award notice from mid-January 2026 names a group of 26 firms that it will work with over the next four years to develop its AI targeting and decision-making capabilities.
This includes specialised military AI firms such as Anduril and Helsing, as well as traditional military technology companies like QinetiQ, Leonardo and Tekever. Other suppliers include Oracle, BT, Faculty AI, Plextek and Deloitte.
The contracts have been awarded under the MoD’s Digital Decision Accelerators for Defence open framework, which the department says “will serve as the primary delivery route for Asgard”.
According to that framework, initially published in June 2025, the winning companies could be focused on one or more of five distinct “lots”, including data integration, accelerators, applications, edge storage and compute, and services.
“This Open Framework will focus on the ‘Decide’ element of the target acquisition cycle (Sense-Decide-Effect); supporting Asgard’s goal of reinventing, and transforming, how land forces deliver operational decision-support and decision-making software via the use of modern artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) technologies,” it said.
It is currently unclear exactly how much each firm will receive from their specific contracts. The MoD has previously said that Asgard has been “backed by more than £1bn in funding”.
Greater civilian casualties
While the MoD continues to publicly claim that the UK has “no intention of developing a fully autonomous weapon”, it has not ruled out incorporating AI into weapon systems, arguing “there must be context-appropriate human involvement in weapons which identify, select and attack targets”.
However, according to Drone Wars UK, a body set up in 2010 to undertake research and advocacy work around drones and other military technologies, the MoD’s claims around AI weapons are “vague to the point of meaninglessness”, and it is impossible to know how such a policy will operate in practice.
“Advocates of AI for military targeting argue that the ‘need’ for speed means that AI can bring enormous benefits in the ‘kill chain’,” said Drone Wars director Chris Cole in response to the contract awards.
“But while computer algorithms can process data much faster than humans, speeding up targeting decisions significantly erodes human oversight and accountability, and will inevitably mean more civilian casualties.”
While proponents of military AI argue that proliferating the technology throughout UK defence will deter future conflict, free up resources, improve various decision-making processes – including military planning and target selection – and stop the country from irreversibly falling behind its adversaries, critics warn there is a clear tension between autonomy and control that is baked into the technology.
Elke Schwarz, a professor of political theory at Queen Mary University London and author of Death machines: The ethics of violent technologies, has said this “intractable problem” with AI means there is a real risk that humans are taken further out of the military decision-making loop, in turn reducing accountability and lowering the threshold for resorting to violence.
Computer Weekly contacted the MoD about the measures it is implementing to ensure its use of AI does not lead to these outcomes, particularly around greater civilian casualties, but received no response.
Algorithmically enabled killing
The MoD’s contract awards follow the use of AI-based targeting systems in Gaza and Iran by Israel and the US, respectively, which have both been linked to mass civilian casualties.
In the case of Gaza, it has been confirmed that the Israeli Defence Force uses at least three AI-powered targeting systems that process vast amounts of data to generate target lists and pinpoint targets for attack.
An investigation by Israeli outlet +972 Magazine found in April 2024 that thousands of Gazans have been marked for death by one of these systems, known as Lavender, while a former Israeli intelligence officer previously told the same outlet in November 2024 that another system, Gospel, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory”.
In the case of Iran, the US military has used Anthropic’s Claude in combination with the Palantir-led Project Maven to help with target selection, leading to it striking 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours. This included a strike against a girls’ school that killed at least 165 people, the majority of them children.
Given the school was previously part of an Iranian naval compound until 2016, Amnesty International and The New York Times suggested that US forces relied on long-outdated information.
While it has not been confirmed that AI directly selected the school as a target – or, if it did, what kind of human involvement there was – US Central Command commander Brad Cooper previously confirmed on 11 March 2026 that the US was using advanced AI tools to process large amounts of data related to its operations in Iran.
