For most of human history, there was a simple, unspoken rule that held society together: seeing was believing. If you witnessed something with your own eyes—a face, a voice, an event—you trusted it. That trust was the bedrock of communities, of courts, of journalism, of everyday conversation. But in the twenty-first century, that ancient rule has been quietly broken. The same artificial intelligence and 5G technology that promised to connect every corner of the world and make the sum of human knowledge available in an instant has also unleashed a shadow that we are only beginning to understand. We now…

Last Thursday, Anthropic, the American AI company behind Claude, released a report that reads like a dark science-fiction preview. Kremlin-backed actors, the company said, had been using Claude to program autonomous lethal drones. A Russian-linked group known to investigators as GTG-27005 used the AI system to develop a model compact enough to run on single-board computers but powerful enough to help a drone select targets—including a specific “person” target class—and to issue detonation commands without a human being in the loop. In other words, they were trying to build a machine that could decide who lives and who dies entirely…