• If you're entertaining this Memorial Day weekend, set-it-and-forget-it dishes can be a lifesaver.
• From ribs to pulled pork, these slow-cooker recipes are perfect for summer gatherings.
• You can also make sides like potato salad and dips in a slow cooker.

Sizzling burgers, blistered corn on the cob, and sweat dripping from your brow as you man the grill — this is how many mark the start of summer.

Fifty-eight percent of Americans plan to barbecue this Memorial Day weekend, according to a new WalletHub report, and the average cost of a cookout is expected to be about $31, a 4% increase from last year.

However, while grilling certainly captures the spirit of Memorial Day weekend, slow cookers can make preparing sides and meats much easier, with minimal cleanup and no need to bother with gas or charcoal.

Or at the very least, having a couple of set-it-and-forget-it dishes can help you focus on your grill.

From mouthwatering barbecue ribs to savory pulled-pork sandwiches, these slow-cooker recipes are perfect for any Memorial Day cookout.

For your Memorial Day cookout this year, try making the potato salad using your slow cooker.

You might not know that you can parboil potatoes in a slow cooker. To do so, chop and cover the potatoes with water, a little salt, pepper, and butter, and cook them until they're fork-tender, usually about six hours on low.

Then, mix the dressing for your potato salad as you normally would, such as mayonnaise, dill, whole grain mustard, and a splash of red wine vinegar. 

You can also make a German-style potato salad with bacon, light dressing, and baby potatoes.

Dips, such as this spinach-and-artichoke dip, are also easily made in a slow cooker.

"I love to make spinach-and-artichoke dip in my slow cooker," Chungah Rhee, the author of the blog Damn Delicious, told Business Insider. 

"You can just free up so much of your time by using a slow cooker and hang out with your guests instead of laboring in the kitchen," Rhee continued. "Especially for side dishes or dips. You put it all together, set the time, and it comes out ready to go."

This set-it-and-forget-it corn-and-jalapeño dip is creamy and easy to make.

"Another favorite of mine is this corn-and-jalapeño dip," Rhee told Insider. 

The recipe combines many of the summer's best ingredients, from fresh and vibrant jalapeños to sweet corn.

Buffalo-chicken dip is another quick and easy favorite you can make in a slow cooker.

One of the benefits of making a slow-cooker Buffalo-chicken dip, like this recipe on Rhee's blog — or any other side dish in a slow cooker — is that it can be prepared well ahead of time and reheated when you're ready to eat.

Rhee's advice for someone using a slow cooker for the first time for entertaining is actually to start out with a dip or side dish. 

"If for some reason it doesn't turn out, because we all know that can happen using an appliance for the first time, it's not detrimental to your dinner party being a success," she said.

Queso can serve a whole party when made in a slow cooker.

This creamy queso dip from Martha Stewart uses ingredients like American cheese and pepper jack cheese, a can of evaporated milk, diced tomatoes with chilies, sliced jalapeños, red onion, and cilantro. 

Brisket is perfect for feeding a larger family and can easily be made in a slow cooker.

"Brisket is a natural partner for the slow cooker, as a gentle braise renders it meltingly tender," Kim Laidlaw writes in her cookbook, "Everyday Slow Cooking: Modern Recipes for Delicious Meals."

Laidlaw's recipe for slow-cooked braised brisket includes garlic, onion, dry red wine, carrot, and chicken or beef stock, with a chimichurri sauce.

Pulled-pork sliders are another great way to use your slow cooker for a cookout.

One of the best ways to use braised and slow-cooked pork shoulder is to make pulled-pork sliders, like this Damn Delicious recipe, with all that tender meat.

To elevate the dish, top the meat with barbecue sauce and slaw before sandwiching it between two fluffy brioche buns or potato rolls. You can also use the carnitas to make tacos.

You can also make barbecue ribs in a slow cooker.

Nothing screams an end-of-summer cookout like sauce-covered ribs, like Laidlaw's recipe as shared on Cooking by the Book. After cooking them in the slow cooker, place them on a baking sheet in your oven and broil them until they're slightly crispy.

To save space on your grill, you can also make slow-cooked sausages and beer brats in the slow cooker.

Brats with onions, peppers, and garlic simmered in the slow cooker with beer — like this recipe by The Magical Slow Cooker — are one way to use your slow cooker on Memorial Day.

Top your brats with a bit of sauerkraut and put them on buns for an easy summer dish.

Mac and cheese can also easily be made in a slow cooker.

If you're looking to add some carbs to your menu, look no further than a piping hot pot of mac and cheese. Martha Stewart's recipe for mac and cheese in a slow cooker calls for evaporated milk, three kinds of cheese, and homemade breadcrumbs.

Garlic-and-herb mushrooms are a delicious side dish but can also be used as a burger topping.

"The recipe for slow-cooker garlic-herb mushrooms is divine and so easy," Rhee said. "Mushrooms made in a slow cooker are truly the best."

Shredded Buffalo chicken goes great on top of salads.

One of the best — and easiest — ways to use your Crock-Pot or slow cooker is by making shredded Buffalo chicken, such as this recipe by The Magical Slow Cooker.

Add seasoned chicken breasts to the slow cooker and cover with your preferred Buffalo sauce. Then add a splash of ranch dressing and a cube of butter, toss your chicken breasts in the mixture to coat fully, and cook until the chicken is shreddable. You can use it for Buffalo-chicken sliders, salads, or tacos.

You can even make Buffalo or barbecue chicken wings using a slow cooker.

You can make any style of wings in a slow cooker, from Asian-style to barbecue and Buffalo wings. Add your wings to the slow cooker, add in your sauce of choice, toss to combine, and let them cook for a couple of hours on high.

To make them crisp up, add a cornstarch and water mixture to your slow cooker. After they're cooked through, broil them for a few minutes in the oven.

Meatballs make a great appetizer for guests and don't require cooking over a hot stove.

Meatballs make the perfect appetizer for parties big and small and are easy to make in a slow cooker. 

Place your seasoned, raw meatballs into the slow cooker, top with sauce, and let the slow cooker finish them off, says one recipe by Spend With Pennies. Serve them on their own with toothpicks or stuff them inside toasted sub rolls for a meatball sandwich.

The U.S. government is spending far more than it takes in as revenue, causing ever-rising debt — and there is no sign that will change anytime soon.

The big picture: Those facts are well-known to anybody who has taken a cursory look at the government's books. But Moody's decision to downgrade the U.S. credit rating Friday is the latest reminder that this precarious fiscal standing comes with real risks.

• Moody's — the last of the three major raters to downgrade the U.S. from its once-pristine credit rating — is acknowledging that U.S. policymakers may have less room to maneuver in future recessions or crises, in light of the massive existing pile of debt.
• It is one more sign that an era in which the U.S. government could borrow seemingly limitless amounts, without experiencing the cost of higher interest rates and inflation, may have come to an end.

Zoom out: Ratings from firms like Moody's help determine how much companies, municipalities, and even sovereign nations must pay to borrow money.

• The downgrade implies that the U.S. government is a bigger credit risk than it seemed, which in theory could make some investors demand higher interest payments to buy government bonds.
• That would ripple through into higher borrowing costs across the economy, including for home and auto loans.
• In practice, most buyers of Treasury bonds aren't doing so based on credit rating firms' assessment, so the direct impact on markets was limited Monday.

State of play: The downgrade came as congressional Republicans move forward on their plan for major tax cuts, which independent fiscal watchdogs believe would increase the deficit by trillions over the coming decade.

• Compared to past episodes when the government has taken on deficit-widening initiatives, the new budget bill arrives at a moment of higher debt and higher interest rates.
• And it comes after global investors have already seemed jittery about the safety of U.S. assets amid the trade war, resulting in higher interest rates and more risk to the ability to continue financing debts.

White House officials emphasize that they inherited sky-high deficits from the Biden administration and say that their policy mix — including deregulation, tariffs, DOGE spending cuts, and pro-growth aspects of the budget bill — will help bring them down.

• "I do want to assure everyone that the deficit is a very significant concern for this administration," top White House economist Stephen Miran told reporters Monday.
• "We're determined to bring it down and to undo the damage to the fiscal health of the United States that was wrought by the Biden administration and its reckless policies."

What they're saying: "Yes, this Moody's action is largely symbolic, and it reflects information we already know," notes Callie Cox, chief market strategist at Ritholtz Wealth Management.

• "But it's a headline that came at a wildly inopportune time for the fixed-income market," which is to say the multi-trillion dollar market for government bonds.
• "Moody's picked a moment when the world is second-guessing U.S. debt, Congress is arguing over government budget proposals, and the policy uncertainty" around long-term Treasuries is the highest in years, she adds.

The bottom line: "The government deficit isn't a problem until investors think it is," says Cox. "And they're increasingly telling us that the deficit is a problem."

• Melania Trump made a rare public appearance at the White House on Monday.
• Trump praised her for bringing together both sides on revenge porn and deepfakes.
• The reality, however, is more complicated.

Melania Trump has never been a traditional first lady. But to hear it from President Donald Trump at a White House event on Monday, she also has a rare ability to smash past entrenched partisan divides.

"I'm not even sure you realize, honey," Trump said to his wife in the Rose Garden at the White House. "You know, a lot of the Democrats and Republicans don't get along so well. You've made them get along."

The first lady's purported achievement: Supporting the passage of the "TAKE IT DOWN" Act, a bill to combat revenge porn, including deepfakes generated by artificial intelligence.

Trump signed that bill on Monday. Though most states already have revenge porn laws on the books, it's the first bill that Trump has signed in his second term that touches AI.

Melania Trump's appearance on Monday was a relative rarity. The New York Times reported earlier this month that she had spent less than 14 days at the White House since Trump's second inauguration, and the first lady has long taken a different approach to the role from prior presidential spouses.

She ultimately spoke for less than four minutes, thanking lawmakers and advocates as she decried the impact of new technologies on children.

"Artificial intelligence and social media are the digital candy for the next generation: sweet, addictive, and engineered to have an impact on the cognitive development of our children," she said.

The first lady has sought to put her stamp on the legislation, framing it as a continuation of the children's well-being and online safety initiatives that she undertook during her husband's first term. "Today, I'm proud to say that the values of 'Be Best' will be reflected in the law," she said.

The reality, however, is more complex.

The bill had been making its way through Congress last year, and it was originally supposed to be signed into law before the Trumps returned to the White House.

But after the bill passed the Senate for the first time in December, the legislation was slipped into an ill-fated government funding bill that Elon Musk and hardline conservatives tanked for unrelated reasons.

The spending bill that ultimately passed days later did not include the TAKE IT DOWN Act, requiring lawmakers to go through the whole exercise once again this year.

The bill was also never that controversial, at least on Capitol Hill. While some digital rights advocates raised free speech concerns, only two lawmakers voted against it when it came up for a vote in the House last month.

Meanwhile, it passed the Senate via a "voice vote" — meaning no one opposed it, so there was no need to hold a vote — in both December and February.

On Monday, none of that was mentioned. The first lady, according to Trump, had taken up an "amazing issue," tackling a problem that's "gone on at levels that nobody's ever seen before."

"Working with our first lady, though, we've shown that that bipartisanship is possible," Trump said. "I mean, it's the first time I've seen such a level of bipartisanship, and it's a beautiful thing to do."

• Instagram is testing a new program that pays creators for driving app traffic and sign-ups.
• The program, called "Referrals," offers $100 for every new user or 1,000 visits, up to $20,000.
• The test is limited to US-based creators and is invite-only, Meta told BI.

Instagram's got a new pitch for creators: Get paid for bringing people to the app.

The Meta-owned app has been quietly testing a program that pays creators for driving people to the app, the company confirmed to Business Insider.

The program, called "Referrals," is an invite-only, limited test that pays US-based creators when people visit Instagram or sign up for a new Instagram account from links shared by the creator.

There are two ways creators can earn money, capped at $20,000, from Instagram's referrals:

1. Some creators will be able to earn $100 for every eligible new user who signs up for an Instagram account.
2. Other creators can earn $100 for every 1,000 "eligible visits" to the Instagram app.

For instance, Courtney Canfield, a creator who runs an Instagram page for her dog Rambo, was offered the latter.

Instagram's referral program is set to run for six weeks from May through June. Meta is working with a third-party partner called Glimmer to handle the payments, according to an Instagram help center page for the program.

The app is telling creators to share links — such as to their profile, reels, posts, stories, and channels — "off Instagram," on other websites and apps like TikTok, YouTube, Discord, and Substack, according to a screenshot viewed by Business Insider.

Instagram has faced fierce competition from other apps like TikTok and YouTube. The new monetization test also comes as Meta's broader competition with other social media platforms takes center stage during the Federal Trade Commission's landmark antitrust case against the company.

Instagram has recently been testing a few new ways to incentivize creators to post to the app as it continues to compete for people's attention. Earlier this year, in January, when TikTok was on the brink of a potential ban, Instagram rolled out a "Breakthrough Bonus" for creators coming over from TikTok. Instagram also inked deals with some creators for exclusive-to-Instagram reels content that ranged from $2,500 to $50,000 a month over the course of three months.

Over the past few years, Instagram has also tested several creator monetization programs.

Instagram's not the only social-media platform to incentivize people to bring over new users. Last year, TikTok rolled out a referral program that rewarded people with shopping discounts and other financial incentives for inviting friends to the app, according to The Information.

• Trump's bill could lead to rampant AI abuse, organizations warn in a letter to Congress.
• A provision in the bill would prevent states from regulating AI for a decade.
• The critics argue it risks civil rights, privacy, and accountability.

A group of high-profile unions, advocacy groups, non-profits, and academic institutions are warning that a provision in President Donald Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" could lead to the "unfettered abuse" of AI.

In a letter to Congress on Monday, 141 organizations called out a provision in Trump's signature bill that would prohibit states from regulating artificial intelligence for a decade. The provision, which Republicans placed into the sweeping tax, immigration, and defense legislation, would be a huge victory for regulation-wary AI companies.

But it would be a nightmare for Americans' civil rights, the groups argued in their letter, which was addressed to Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson and Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

"Protections for civil rights and children's privacy, transparency in consumer-facing chatbots to prevent fraud, and other safeguards would be invalidated, even those that are uncontroversial," the letter reads.

"The resulting unfettered abuses of AI or automated decision systems could run the gamut from pocketbook harms to working families like decisions on rental prices, to serious violations of ordinary Americans' civil rights, and even to large-scale threats like aiding in cyber attacks on critical infrastructure or the production of biological weapons," it continues.

And, the letter added, without state-level regulations on emerging technologies, companies wouldn't be held accountable.

"This moratorium would mean that even if a company deliberately designs an algorithm that causes foreseeable harm — regardless of how intentional or egregious the misconduct or how devastating the consequences — the company making that bad tech would be unaccountable to lawmakers and the public," the letter reads.

The letter's signatories include Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Economic Policy Institute, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, the Alphabet Workers Union, and many others.

The provision would invalidate critical state laws — like those already in effect in New Jersey and Colorado — designed to protect people from the harms created by AI, like algorithmic discrimination, which can affect everything from housing, policing, healthcare, and financial services, the letter argues.

Those harms include "many documented cases of AI having highly sexualized conversations with minors and even encouraging minors to commit harm to themselves and others; AI programs making healthcare decisions that have led to adverse and biased outcomes; and AI enabling thousands of women and girls to be victimized by nonconsensual deepfakes," the letter says.

Trump's signature bill, which the House Budget Committee moved forward on Sunday, still has to clear a series of votes in the House before going to the Senate, and the bill's AI provision has to meet a high bar to remain in the larger bill.

The White House and a representative for Speaker Mike Johnson did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Microsoft's Build developer conference kicked off Monday with a slew of agentic AI updates.
• Microsoft's CTO said there's been an "explosion" of people using agents over the last year, with daily active users doubling.
• The keynote included new agentic features in GitHub, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and appearances from Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

It was all about agentic AI at Microsoft's big developer event on Monday.

"The thing that we've seen over the past year is just sort of an explosion of agents," Microsoft CTO and executive vice president of AI, Kevin Scott, said during the company's Build conference.

Scott added that the number of daily active users of the various AI agents that Microsoft has visibility into "more than doubled" since Microsoft's Build event last year.

CEOs and executives across the tech industry have heralded 2025 as the year of agentic AI, and the Microsoft executive took some time to define what Microsoft means by the term.

Scott described the AI agents Microsoft is building as "a thing that a human being is able to delegate tasks to." AI agents are still in their early days, and Scott said there's still a bit of a "capability overhang with reasoning" at the moment, but they will continue to improve. As that happens over the next year, he said AI agents will get more powerful and cheaper to operate.

'The next big step forward'

Microsoft made a slew of announcements about AI updates and partnerships related to agentic AI during its opening keynote at Build.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that the company is working to create a host of tools to help build an open, "agentic web" at scale, including cloud computing tools available through its Microsoft Azure platform. The company demoed multiple new AI features available in Windows, Office, Azure, and other platforms throughout the keynote.

Showcasing Microsoft's new Azure SRE agent for site reliability engineering, which will be embedded in GitHub Copilot, Nadella said agents are all about having a reliable AI "peer" that you can delegate complex tasks to and trust to help remove "pain points" for developers, such as getting woken up in the middle of the night to deal with a website issue.

"This is the next big step forward, which is a full coding agent, built right into GitHub, taking Copilot from being a pair programmer to a peer programmer," Nadella said. "You can assign issues to Copilot, bug fixes, new features, code maintenance, and it'll complete these tasks autonomously."

Microsoft also flexed its reach with virtual appearances from a who's who of AI CEOs, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Tesla and xAI CEO Elon Musk, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Altman made a live appearance virtually to talk about the evolution of agentic AI and the recent launch of Codex, the AI startup's new agent designed to assist programmers with writing code, fixing bugs, and running tests. Altman described Codex as "true software engineering task delegation."

"We've been talking about someday we'd get to a real agentic coding experience, and it's kind of wild to me that it's finally here," Altman said. "I think this is one of the biggest changes to programming that I've ever seen."

"This idea that you now have a real virtual teammate that you can assign work to, that you can say, 'Hey, go off and do some of the stuff you were just doing and increasingly more advanced things,' you know at some point saying, 'I've got a big idea, go off and work for a couple of days and do it,'" the OpenAI CEO added.

The productivity gains can also be significant, Altman said.

"It was amazing to watch over the last few months as we were working on Codex internally — you know there's always a few people who are the early adopters — and how quickly the people who were just using Codex all day changed their workflow and just the incredible amount they were able to do relative to someone else was quite interesting," he said.

Microsoft announced plans to expand the AI models available through Azure to integrate xAI's Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini. In a pre-recorded clip, Musk, who once interned at Microsoft, talked with Nadella about his first experiences using Microsoft software as well as Grok's capabilities.

Microsoft also introduced "Copilot Tuning" to create agents using company data. The announcement confirmed Business Insider's reporting from last week that Microsoft was planning to debut a new Copilot designed to "rapidly channel an organization's knowledge into a Copilot that can 'talk,' 'think,' and 'work' like the tenant itself," according to an internal memo. That project was previously called Tenant Copilot internally, the company has since confirmed.

In Satya Nadella's closing comments, the Microsoft CEO said the company is trying to apply AI across the "full stack" of software development and agentic web products, including Microsoft 365 Teams, Copilot Studio, and more.

"Ultimately, though, all of this is about creating opportunity to fuel your ambition," the Microsoft CEO said, pointing to a father who used Foundry to speed the diagnosis of a rare disease affecting his son and a startup in South America that created an app to gamify wellness.

• Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is railing against a major stablecoin bill in Congress.
• Warren argued that the legislation, if passed, will "accelerate Trump's corruption."
• The Massachusetts senator has been a frequent critic of the administration on regulatory matters.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts will take to the Senate floor on Monday to push back against a major stablecoin bill, arguing that the legislation could instead benefit President Donald Trump and his family's cryptocurrency business ventures.

Warren, a former Democratic presidential candidate and the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, is on the opposing side of the so-called GENIUS Act, a bill intended to regulate stablecoins — a type of currency whose value is tied to another asset.

"The GENIUS Act will accelerate Trump's corruption by supercharging the size of the stablecoin market and the reach and profitability of USD1," the lawmaker will say in a Senate speech. "For the first time in American history, it also makes our president — Donald Trump — the regulator of his own financial product."

"Congress should not be making it even easier for him to line his pockets with even more shady crypto cash," the remarks continue to say. "If Congress does not fix this issue here, today, then it will be aiding and abetting his corruption every time President Trump's stablecoin is used to finance a corrupt deal."

The stablecoin bill once had a bipartisan veneer, with Democrats joining Republicans in backing the legislation. But the bill has fallen out of favor with Democrats in the wake of Trump's crypto ventures, including the launch of his own meme coin in January and an upcoming dinner for his coin's top 220 investors.

The top 25 holders of the meme coin are set to attend a reception and a VIP White House tour.

In Warren's remarks, she also contends that the legislation could "directly lead to the next financial meltdown."

Before her 2012 election to the Senate, Warren conceived of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the independent consumer protection agency that the White House DOGE office has sought to dismantle since the beginning of the year.

• US special operations is using artificial intelligence to reduce the cognitive load on operators.
• This includes not just combat operations but also paperwork, manual tasks, and data.
• Various types of AI are already being employed and expanded.

From warfighting to paperwork, US Special Operations Forces are interested in getting in on AI to simplify the work.

The goal for these elite forces, much like it is for regular people working office jobs and using AI to sort data or compile information, is to lessen the overall cognitive load, or mental effort, required for whatever a task may be. A lot of different types of artificial intelligence are being used, and it's only growing.

AI has many potential applications for the US military, from autonomous features in uncrewed systems to AI-enabled targeting to enhanced situational awareness. The Department of Defense is eager to implement this technology to prepare US forces for a high-end technological conflict chock full of data and information.

Future wars could be fought in an environment where decision-making may need to happen quicker than humans alone can do, and that's where military officials see the benefit of AI and human-machine teaming.

With AI, "we can reduce the cognitive burden of our operators," Col. Rhea Pritchett, the program executive officer of SOF Digital Applications, said at SOF Week in Tampa, Florida, earlier this month. Instead of worrying about other things, operators "will take that precious time to critically think about actions that they need to take next to achieve the effect that they want."

AI can sift through massive amounts of data quickly to focus on necessary information in a combat scenario and it can aid in mission planning and command and control functions.

This technology can also be used in battlespace awareness tools "to identify the position or location information of objects, people, and terrain — enhancing operator analysis and decision-making capabilities," Pritchett added over email.

These kinds of capabilities are already being developed.

But there are other functions of AI in SOF, and they aren't unlike the way civilians use ChatGPT or other AI-driven platforms for their jobs and personal lives.

That includes paperwork: situational reports, concepts for operations, and forecasting supplies. The tasks that might take an operator a long time to complete and draw their focus away from other aspects of the job.

Back-end work, as Ben Van Roo, CEO and cofounder of Legion Intelligence Inc, put it, could also be aided by artificial intelligence. Such work could include better search functions for analyzing DoD doctrine and understanding elements of specific locations, commands, or job positions.

One prime example could be using AI tools when entering a new position to quickly get up to speed on the work. When military personnel receive orders for their next job, it can be a lot of work to learn not only the ins and outs of the position itself but also the larger bureaucracy, geographic information, and historical and political context, what their predecessor did, types of weapons and capabilities present, and so on.

That is a bit different than how AI in the military is regularly perceived. "People tend to jump to Terminator," Van Roo said. "Actually, the great majority of it right now is just, people can barely even do their jobs with all these archaic systems."

While there are many possibilities for AI technology in warfighting systems, such as the AI-enabled drones that are demonstrating just how effective this technology can make an uncrewed fighting platform or the AI algorithms being taught to fly fighter jets, there's much that can be done to improve the mundane.

AI has the potential to address some of the headaches and help reform some older technological policies, effectively streamlining the processes. It might even have an application in assessing details for contracts and programs.

"The potential to relieve the cognitive load is extremely high," Van Roo said.

AI could provide assistance with what some operators might consider the more time-consuming tasks of their job and take a form similar to an AI assistant designed to take notes, gather and review key client data, transcribe meetings, and outline important takeaways.

AI systems are already being used in SOF, Pritchett told BI, including generative machine learning, large language models, natural language processing, and computer vision.

The rise of AI in militaries has been met with skepticism and ethical concerns from experts and officials about its implementation, especially in combat scenarios.

The Pentagon has maintained that its policy on AI will keep a human in the loop for decision-making, though some observers have argued that doing so might not always be possible in a high-speed, data-driven future fight. Some have also cautioned that the technology may end up developing at a much quicker pace than Washington and the Pentagon can regulate it.