Vice President JD Vance used one of the most prestigious military commissioning stages in the country to deliver a pointed warning about artificial intelligence and the future of warfare Thursday, telling the graduating class of the United States Air Force Academy that no matter how rapidly the technology evolves, the moral weight of combat decisions must remain in human hands — not in machines.
Vance delivered the commencement address to the 2026 graduating class at Falcon Stadium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on May 28, 2026. The Class of 2026 graduation marked the Academy’s 68th commencement ceremony, where more than 900 cadets commissioned as officers in the United States Air Force and United States Space Force. The ceremony concluded with a flyover by the Air Force Thunderbirds.
A Moment Built for the Warning
Vance, a Marine Corps veteran and the first Marine to serve as vice president, acknowledged early in his address that artificial intelligence has become a lightning rod across American culture — noting that at civilian commencement ceremonies this graduation season, corporate leaders discussing AI have been met with audible displeasure from their audiences. Surrounded by a stadium of new military officers, Vance made clear he was not going to shy away from the subject. “You can’t boo me,” he told the graduates. “I’m the vice president of the United States.”
But the moment of levity preceded a serious message. Vance said that while many Americans are rightly anxious about AI’s effects on the economy and social life, his deepest concern lies elsewhere. “The thing I worry about most with AI is how it will change warfare,” he said.
Endorsing a Moral Framework
Before laying out his own argument, Vance pointed to a recent statement by Pope Leo XIV, who had encouraged people not to outsource important moral decisions to digital technology. Vance said he wanted to endorse that sentiment and make it more specific to the men and women sitting before him in uniform.
The vice president framed the issue not as a question of technological capability but of moral responsibility. He told the graduates that what makes American warfighters unique is not only their lethality but their conscience — and that the two must always coexist. “When I say that we wage war justly,” he said, “I mean fundamentally that you must do so because you are the ones who execute. You are the ones who lead on the battlefield. You are the ones who ensure that our lethality in war, which is amazing and necessary, also coexists with our heart and with our conscience.”
The Core Warning
Vance then delivered what he called perhaps his most important point of the entire address. “If the warfare of the future is to live up to the moral values of our ancestors, decisions over life and death must be made by humans and not machines,” he said. “So, as AI transforms the battlefield, in some ways positively, in some ways not, I ask that you be jealous and selfish about your role as the decision maker in warfare. Use technology to make you better, but never submit to it. You are the masters of warfare and both your minds but also your hearts are the opposite of artificial.”
The words carried particular weight given the context in which they were delivered. Vance told the graduating cadets they are entering an entirely new era of warfare where new technologies powered by artificial intelligence are “evolving far faster than military institutions have historically been accustomed to.” That rapid pace of change, he made clear, is precisely what makes the human element more important — not less.
A Technology Landscape Moving at Unprecedented Speed
The warning came at a moment when AI’s integration into military systems is accelerating across every domain of conflict. Autonomous drones, AI-assisted targeting, machine-learning-driven intelligence analysis, and cyber warfare tools powered by artificial intelligence have moved in recent years from theoretical frameworks to active deployment considerations for the world’s major military powers. The United States, China, and Russia have all significantly expanded investment in autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons systems, raising urgent international questions about accountability, ethics, and the rules of engagement in an era when machines can identify and engage targets faster than any human operator.
For the Air Force and Space Force specifically, the implications are profound. Unmanned systems already conduct surveillance and strike operations, and the integration of AI decision-support tools into cockpit environments and command structures is advancing rapidly. The question of how much autonomy to extend to those systems — and where the irreducible human role in lethal decision-making begins and ends — has become one of the defining policy debates of the current era in defense.
Technology as a Tool, Not a Master
Vance did not call for rejecting the technology. He was deliberate in acknowledging its value, noting that AI has already changed warfare in positive ways alongside the negative. His argument was not Luddite in nature — it was a call for a specific kind of discipline. He told the graduates to use technology aggressively to enhance their capabilities, but to guard jealously against the creeping tendency to delegate judgment upward to a system rather than exercising it themselves.
That framing — technology as servant, not sovereign — was directed at officers who will spend their careers making exactly those kinds of decisions, often under conditions of extreme uncertainty, incomplete information, and time pressure. Vance acknowledged the weight of it. “It is an incredible burden to put on your shoulders,” he said, “but it is one that we entrust to you with full confidence.”
“Your Hearts Are the Opposite of Artificial”
The address also touched on the civilian investments the administration is making to keep pace with the technological demands of modern warfare, including the F-47 next-generation fighter aircraft and the Golden Dome missile defense initiative. Vance said those programs reflect the government’s end of a bargain with the men and women who serve — a commitment to give them the best tools available while expecting them to remain the moral arbiters of how those tools are used.
But the vice president returned at the end to the human dimension. Vance, who previously served as a U.S. Senator from Ohio and is a Marine Corps veteran who served on active duty from 2003 to 2007, spoke from a position of personal understanding of what it means to carry the burden of military service. In his closing remarks to the class, he drew a direct line from their character — forged across four years of academic, physical, and moral training — to their fitness for exactly the kind of judgment he was describing.
“Most people spend their entire lives trying to eliminate uncertainty,” he told the graduates. “America’s greatest military institutions such as this one teach you to thrive in it. You thrive in uncertainty and that’s what makes you so lethal.” It was, in essence, the same argument applied to AI: the ability to act with moral clarity under pressure is a distinctly human quality, and one that no algorithm, however sophisticated, has yet replicated or should be trusted to replace.
The commencement concluded with a flyover by the Air Force Thunderbirds. The 931 members of the Class of 2026, upon receiving their commissions, will serve a minimum of five years in the Air Force or Space Force — entering a military landscape where the questions Vance raised Thursday will not remain theoretical for long.