What Cognitive Science Tells Us About AI Warfare

What Cognitive Science Tells Us About AI Warfare

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in 2025. (Photo by Chance Yeh.)The story starts in 1966 with Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT, who built a program called ELIZA that did nothing more than rephrase your statements as questions, in “the style of a Rogerian therapist.” You’d type “I’m feeling sad” and ELIZA would respond “Why are you feeling sad?” You’d type “My mother makes me angry” and it would ask “Tell me more about your family.” The whole thing was a few h…