Former CIA Director General David Petraeus has predicted that large language models will reach the level of a Nobel laureate by the end of this year.
He also said AI agents could soon work as military staff officers. He was speaking at the NDTV World Summit 2026 in Delhi.
"So by the end of this year, large language models will be at that level, a great Nobel laureate," Petraeus said.
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He traced the pace of progress through a conversation he said he had with Anthropic's leaders in the summer of 2025. They described the models of the time as "basically the level of a good PhD student", he said, and told him they would reach the level of a great PhD within nine months.
"And that has happened. That took place this spring," Petraeus said. He added that the leap to Nobel laureate level should come within nine months of that.
Petraeus said this would change how commanders work. "At some point, we can have multiple agents working for us," he said. "These would be staff officers now who never sleep, never eat, never have to take a break."
He said he already uses an AI agent called Argus, named after the Greek mythological creature with 100 eyes. "Imagine having 100 Argus's that are even better than the current Argus," said Petraeus, who is chairman of the KKR Global Institute.
He said the agents would move from monitoring and reporting to "directing action".
On the battlefield, he said AI could fuse data from radars and acoustic sensors into a high-fidelity air picture, and an agent could decide which interceptor drone to launch against an incoming one.
"That's where we're headed, and that does pose enormous ethical issues and ethical concerns," he said.
Petraeus called this "the most profound period of change in warfare in our lifetimes". He said Ukraine and Russia each use over 10,000 drones a day, and that this dwarfs what has been seen in the Middle East.
He said warfare is not yet truly autonomous, but that larger numbers of autonomous systems could appear by the end of this year or next.
On human control, he said: "The human is not in the loop anymore. The human is on the loop."
He said the Pentagon had announced an autonomous warfare command, but that every country needs to accelerate. In his view, militaries do not have five years to redesign themselves, "because we don't have five years".
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