--- description: Plus, our day with killer robots title: The AI War Game That Looks Uncomfortably Like Reality image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte53b25e118a8d83b/69b987865ac631a7b4dd1b7c/image.png?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Business](/section/business/) ## Business Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close * [AI](/tag/ai/) ## AI Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close # The AI War Game That Looks Uncomfortably Like Reality  by [Billy Perrigo](/author/billy-perrigo/)  ## Billy Perrigo Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Correspondent Mar 17, 2026 7:05 PM CUT  Marc Warner, the CEO of Faculty, on the set of Intelligence Rising. Marc Warner, the CEO of Faculty, on the set of Intelligence Rising.Photo by Laurence Connor  by [Billy Perrigo](/author/billy-perrigo/)  ## Billy Perrigo Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Correspondent Mar 17, 2026 7:05 PM CUT Welcome back to _In the Loop_, TIME’s twice-weekly newsletter about AI. We're publishing these editions both as stories on Time.com and as emails. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? [**Subscribe to** _In the Loop_](https://timeintheloop.beehiiv.com/subscribe "undefined") ## What to Know: Intelligence Rising Last year, I wrote about Intelligence Rising: a war game in which former government officials played out a scenario depicting the arrival of advanced AI, to better understand how states and companies might respond. It was like Dungeons and Dragons, except for AI nerds. My story compressed three hours of gameplay down into a few paragraphs. But this weekend, a feature-length documentary premiered that followed an entire game of Intelligence Rising from start to finish. High-profile players included a former U.S. Army general and the former head of the U.K. civil service, plus prominent philosophers and technologists. The film probably won’t make headlines, and it might not even be the most popular AI documentary released this year. But if you’re interested in AI or geopolitics, it’s worth a watch. Filmed in 2024—in a simpler time, back when the idea of conflicts between governments and AI companies still seemed far-fetched—it more-or-less accurately models the future that we’re living through today. Players are sorted into different teams, including the U.S. government, China, and the tech industry, and must respond to fast-changing world events in whatever way they see fit. Without spoiling the ending, it comes to a more hopeful conclusion than the version of the game that I observed—which ended in human extinction. The goal of the film, according to its protagonist, isn’t to accurately predict the future. Instead, it’s to communicate—both to players and viewers—just how plausible this kind of future might be. “Humans are bad at exponentials, and it's quite hard for politicians to make big decisions \[without the\] public understanding what's going on,” says Marc Warner, who is the CEO of the British AI company Faculty, a consultancy that does technical AI safety work for the frontier AI model companies and the U.K. government. “The more thinking is done up front, and the less that you have to do in the moment, the better you're going to be able to deal with all of this.” Warner is the host of the war game at the core of the film, and in an inspired bit of filmmaking, the narrative cuts between the game and his family life, where he and his wife are raising an infant son. We see them grapple with the possibility that the world their cute baby grows up into may be very different from today’s, assuming catastrophe can be averted. That gives emotional weight to what otherwise might be a chilling but ultimately abstract piece of speculative fiction. ## Who to Know: Marc Warner Beyond Intelligence Rising, Warner has been in the news recently because his AI company, Faculty, was acquired by the professional services giant Accenture. The deal, which is pending regulatory approval, would see Warner become Accenture’s chief technology officer. Faculty would retain its brand and operate with a high degree of independence, Warner says, but with the resources of a global company with some 800,000 staff at its back. The belief that powerful AI is near at hand was part of the reason Warner decided the acquisition was the best option, he says. “If you believe that AI is going to happen over 50 years, I think \[staying independent\] is the best option,” he says. “We're much more like: this is happening now.” He says that Accenture’s global reach is exactly what Faculty needs to fulfill its mission of driving the safe, widespread adoption of AI. In practice, that will likely mean that Faculty plays a big role in helping Accenture, and its many clients, transition their businesses to make better use of AI. I asked Warner if that meant he would now be helping Accenture lay off huge numbers of employees and replace them with AI tools. “The only way we've ever seen it work is: AI is not capable of doing a one-for-one replacement of a person,” he replied. “What actually happens is: a job is a series of tasks, and AI can fulfill some of those tasks.” In most cases, he claims, companies prefer using these productivity advances to drive better outcomes for customers than laying people off. But he conceded that at a macro level, job disruption is likely coming soon—and that political attempts to shore up doomed sectors might be futile. “In circumstances where something can be disrupted by AI and we choose not to because we want to preserve jobs, it's quite hard to ensure that organization stays competitive,” Warner says. “And therefore, those jobs actually end up going eventually anyway.” Warner whips out a pen and starts drawing on a whiteboard. There’s a big debate in the AI industry about where the economic value of AI will ultimately accrue, he says, while sketching out the different levels of the tech stack. Is it the frontier model companies, which are currently pouring billions of dollars into training new models with uncertain returns? Will chipmakers like Nvidia continue to reap massive profits as their technology gets commoditized? Nobody knows, Warner says. It soon becomes clear where he’s going with this. At the top of the stack he has scrawled TRANSFORMATION—the task of helping companies adapt to AI. Unlike the other levels of the stack, he says, here it is entirely clear where the value will accrue. “From an Accenture perspective,” he says, “I actually think this is going to turn out very well.” ## ## AI in Action An internal OpenAI council on user wellbeing unanimously resisted the company’s plans to develop an “adult mode” feature in ChatGPT, with one member calling it a “sexy suicide coach,” the Wall Street Journal [reported](https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-adult-mode-chatgpt-f9e5fc1a?st=GHrxJ1&reflink=desktopwebshare%5Fpermalink&utm%5Fsource=beehiiv&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=newsletter-in-the-loop&%5Fbhlid=a34b2e8d8257c42a167fdd1fa5135e7232791e4d "undefined"). OpenAI is reportedly forging ahead with the plans anyway, although has delayed the launch until later in the year. ## What We’re Reading [Rise of the AI Soldiers](https://time.com/article/2026/03/09/ai-robots-soldiers-war "undefined") by Charlie Campbell in TIME My colleague Charlie went to meet some gun-toting humanoids for a chilling story about AI warfare. “We think there’s a moral imperative to put these robots into war instead of soldiers,” a cofounder of a killer robot company tells him. ## ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/article/2026/03/17/intelligence-rising-ai-war-game-faculty-marc-warner/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/article/2026/03/17/intelligence-rising-ai-war-game-faculty-marc-warner/"},"headline":"The AI War Game That Looks Uncomfortably Like Reality","datePublished":"2026-03-17T19:05:47.147Z","dateModified":"2026-03-17T19:05:52.097Z","description":"Plus, our day with killer robots","url":"https://time.com/article/2026/03/17/intelligence-rising-ai-war-game-faculty-marc-warner/","keywords":["AI"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte53b25e118a8d83b/69b987865ac631a7b4dd1b7c/image.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Billy Perrigo","jobTitle":"Correspondent","url":"https://time.com/author/billy-perrigo/"}],"articleSection":"Business","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte53b25e118a8d83b/69b987865ac631a7b4dd1b7c/image.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"image.png","caption":"","creditText":"Photo by Laurence Connor","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/business/","name":"Business"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/ai/","name":"AI"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/article/2026/03/17/intelligence-rising-ai-war-game-faculty-marc-warner/","name":"The AI War Game That Looks Uncomfortably Like Reality"}}]}] ```