Melanie W. Sisson is a senior fellow in the Brookings Institution's Foreign Policy program and its Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology. She is a member of the US delegation to the Track II Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence and National Security that Brookings convenes with Tsinghua University's Center for International Security and Strategy (Advancing human control of military AI (Sisson and Jiang, Brookings, September 2026)).
Positions on military AI
In a Brookings commentary of September 9, 2026, co-published with a Chinese perspective by Tianjiao Jiang, Sisson argues that Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping should agree "that only humans, not AI, should make the decision to initiate a cyberattack against each other's nuclear command, control, and communications systems (NC3) or critical infrastructure." She presents this as an extension of the late-2024 US–China agreement that humans should control decisions to use nuclear weapons, which she calls "only the starting point" as militaries integrate agentic AI (Advancing human control of military AI (Sisson and Jiang, Brookings, September 2026)).
Her argument identifies three routes by which AI-powered cyber capabilities could start a military crisis with NC3 or critical infrastructure: an intentional attack; an unplanned attack while a capability is only being pre-positioned, through human error, model limitations, or AI agents acting in unanticipated ways; and unauthorized use by a bad actor. She describes the proposed principle as "confined to agreement on the narrow point" of minimizing the likelihood that strategic attacks are caused by "chance, error, advanced AI capable of exceeding human-defined constraints, or unauthorized actors," and calls leader-level statements "the necessary precondition for bilateral dialogue on verifiable protocols and safeguards" (Advancing human control of military AI (Sisson and Jiang, Brookings, September 2026)). Reuters reported the proposal on September 17, 2026, noting that neither government had endorsed it (Source: reuters.com).
Relationships
- related: Brookings Institution AI Initiative — employer; convenes the Track II dialogue
- related: Advancing human control of military AI (Sisson and Jiang, Brookings, September 2026) — co-authored commentary
- related: Tianjiao Jiang — co-author of the September 2026 commentary
- related: Autonomous Weapons, US-China AI Competition: Different Races, Different Metrics — the debates the proposal enters