In European history, there is a pattern: every 50 or 75 years or so, the international order of its time, the institutions and the ideas, gradually drift out of alignment with reality. If you go back to the institutions built in the rubble of 1945 and as the Cold War was beginning, you have the UN, Nato, the WTO, the IMF etc — and now they all seem played-out and exhausted.

The EU — the European Economic Community, as it was — is one of those institutions. In the years before the referendum, I made several arguments in favor of leaving. I said, if you look around, what do you see? You see a mix of stagnation, anti-technology, anti-growth, anti-future, bureaucracy — bureaucracy dedicated to Leninist bureaucratic centralism in Brussels, where everything will improve if everything is uniformly controlled by the Commission. But they’ve got low growth, high debt, nightmare pension systems, nightmare demographics, and immigration that is out of control and fueling the rise of extremist parties.

If you look at what’s happening technologically, increasingly it’s China and California which are dominating, and Europe is not in the game. Again, that was regarded as a very eccentric argument to make 10 years ago, but now it’s an obvious, very mainstream thing. 

I also argued that the regime in Britain is knackered and is failing, and the institutions are knackered, and they’re not going to be able to cope with the world that’s coming. That was an extremely niche view in 2015, regarded, generally speaking, as crazy. Now, of course, you can go on Twitter today, and you can see the vast majority of Westminster is now having to face up to the reality that the old parties are knackered, old Whitehall is knackered, the old media ecosystem is knackered, the universities have lost huge credibility, etc. etc. 

Also obvious is that Britain now has huge problems. In all sorts of ways we have not done what the Vote Leave plan was — and what we started doing in 2019 and 2020 — because the Tories stopped it all. But is the answer to that to say, “Oh yeah, we need the bureaucratic centralism of the European Commission, we need more EU AI acts, we need more of that kind of regulation, that’s the future”? Does anyone in their right mind really think that? 

So how does Westminster respond to this now? Westminster doesn’t want to face all the technology issues, never has done. Our political elites and Whitehall elites, for complicated reasons from the Sixties and Seventies, very deliberately and explicitly stepped back from thinking about frontier technology. 

So now people don’t want to look at those questions. Their response now is: instead of looking at all the very, very obvious big things like our totally farcical procurement system, totally farcical planning system, totally farcical energy, totally farcical housing, totally farcical MoD, totally farcical welfare, a Westminster and Whitehall that is pathological about on technology and doesn’t want to take it seriously — the answer to those problems is to rejoin the EU. 

Why? Because the old people from the old system are determined not to face reality, determined not to face the future. They just want to retreat to their comfort zone, which is having more stupid culture wars about Brexit, because that’s where they’re happy. They’re pretending that rejoining the single market is somehow a great thing, when you can barely even see the single market in the data. If you look at the Draghi report, which of course also is basically ignored in London because it’s super bad for the EU, you have a perfect example of the actual EU technocracy itself recently writing about how basically a lot of Europe is deluded on the single market. Westminster doesn’t want to face any of those problems either.

Go back to the Eighties and look at the newspapers at the time and the news at the time. There’s obviously a lot of bitter arguments, but the political class is actually engaged with the real issues of the British economy. That is actually what dominates the news, and you have a whole set of people reading things and arguing about them and making complicated arguments in public about what we have to do on privatization, you name it. 

You look at the 10 years since Brexit and it’s basically characterized by Westminster being absolutely pathologically determined not to face any of these core problems in any kind of coherent way. It’s a constant soap opera, and both sides — both sides in the sense of the kind of inside-Westminster Left and Right — have been much happier arguing about all the trans madness in 2020. The Guardian, the Telegraph, Labour and the Tories were happier arguing about that and arguing about Brexit than they were about dealing with any of these other actual core problems.

And Whitehall doesn’t care about these problems. Whitehall cares about preserving existing power and existing institutions and existing budgets, and it cares, most importantly, about itself retaining control over its own personnel caste system. That is its actual priority, and everything will always be sacrificed to that, as you saw in Covid, as you could see in Ukraine, as you can see on everything.

So now you’ve got stagnant growth, you’ve got completely pathological institutions that actually need real-terms increases in money just to stand still, and you’ve got political parties and senior civil servants completely dedicated to not changing how anything works. 

If you put those three things together, you’ve got what we can see all around us, which is every part of the system now failing, and those failings interacting with each other in various ways. So you’ve got a shitshow in that you can’t deport people, and you’re scraping crazy Afghans off the street and putting them in prison, but then that means you’ve got to let all these people out, and then that means you’ve got X, and then that means you’ve got Y, and then that means the budgets for these things are all knackered as well. So all these things are now starting to ping into each other. You haven’t just got one defunct bureaucracy, with internal silos going haywire, you’ve also got, horizontally, them all smashing into each other and breaking — and no one has authority to deal with the interactions between all these different parts of the system.

But in all sorts of ways, Britain is actually the best-placed country in the West. In practical terms, it is much easier to do real regime change in Britain than it is in America or anywhere in Europe, because of our unwritten constitution and the weird way in which the powers of the Prime Minister actually work. So, unlike Trump, the Prime Minister can go in today and say, “Fired, fired, fired, fired, fired. This government department is closed, and I’m creating a new one.” The civil service has to do it, and the courts can’t stop it, or even judicially review these things. In no other Western country is that possible. 

That is why you see two things happening on the Left now: one, the plan to change the electoral system to PR (proportional representation), and then, secondly, discussions about how you encode protections for the civil service to make it extremely difficult to actually do what I’m talking about. What they’re thinking is — and it’s actually logical from their point of view — that if you pass certain kinds of legislation defending the current Whitehall system, and then you do PR, you make it extremely hard for anybody coming in to actually change anything. You completely embed the current catastrophic situation, which is what they want to do.

What they’re terrified of is Nigel Farage doing some kind of Doge-type thing and saying, “Right, I’m going to bring in 20 hotshots, fire all the permanent secretaries, put them in charge of this, use the actual powers of the PM, close departments, open them, fire people, and then pass a whole series of primary legislation, repeal the Human Rights Act, repeal the Equalities Act, reform how judicial review works, bin the Climate Change Act.” You go through 15 things, you whack them all in year one with primary legislation.

If you have an actual serious list of these things, the right way to do it would be that you draft all this legislation in opposition, you make the case in the election, in the manifesto, you win on the Thursday, and on Monday morning, these bills start hammering through into parliament. And you also make clear to the House of Lords that if anyone thinks that they can fuck around, we’re going straight at the King, we’ll appoint 600 new peers, and it’ll be blitzkrieg on you guys.

You smash that through in primary legislation, so you have that combination of primary legislation changing fundamentals, and you actually use the constitutional powers of the PM, as I’ve discussed, and the whole thing starts to shift. That’s what they are terrified of — correctly from their point of view — in Whitehall, in Labour, in the Inner Temple, etc. etc. And that’s why you start to see this mix of “Rejoin the EU”, PR, censorship, and embedding legislation to protect the civil service. They’re thinking that if they can bring off some combination of those things, then they can get to the state they want to, which is that they don’t have to worry about elections anymore. And they’ve convinced themselves that everyone who doesn’t agree with them now is fascist. Go back to pre-referendum: mainstream people in the system in Westminster hated me, thought I was crazy, stupid, wrong, but they didn’t say I was actually a fascist who should be in jail. Now, their argument about people like me is that we’re actually fascists who should be in jail and shouldn’t be allowed to actually participate in democratic politics.

So almost all the positive things that we could have changed after Brexit, Westminster, the Tories and Labour have been adamant in refusing to do. But just because of inertia, we haven’t adopted various of the EU regulations, and therefore we haven’t shot ourselves in both feet the way that Brussels has. As the old system fails, something new is being born — but for the moment, it is unclear exactly what.

***

This essay was adapted from Dominic Cummings’ interview on the Anglofuturism podcast.

LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-20260507) summary:

• Nepotistic Leadership: state efforts are centered around katerina tikhonova, whose expertise in dance and mathematics is being leveraged to oversee elite academic ai initiatives.
• State Indoctrination: authorities are force feeding ideological constraints by requiring models to adhere strictly to ambiguous russian spiritual and moral values.
• Brain Drain: a mass exodus of technical talent following the invasion of ukraine has severely crippled the nation’s internal research and development capacity.
• Hardware Deficit: the country remains decades behind in semiconductor production, relying desperately on illicit gray market imports that face increasing international scrutiny.
• Military Integration: artificial intelligence development is inextricably linked to the defense and security apparatus, leaving little room for genuine civilian innovation.
• Sovereignty Delusion: officials promote a fantasy of technological self-sufficiency while lacking both the domestic hardware infrastructure and the computing power to execute it.
• Limited Access: elite resources like the msu supercomputer are gated behind state-controlled circles, preventing the broader collaboration necessary for scientific advancement.
• Chinese Dependency: reliance on chinese hardware is a precarious strategy, as foreign suppliers prioritize their own domestic demand for chips over russian needs.

LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-20260507) summary:

• Systemic Failure: institutional incompetence led to a dying student being handcuffed while officers prioritised false accusations of bias over basic medical aid.
• Ideological Capture: uk law enforcement has been corrupted by academic doctrines that explicitly reject equality before the law in favour of engineered racial outcomes.
• Two Tier Policing: official policies mandate discriminatory practices that penalise majority citizens while fostering a culture of selective enforcement.
• Weaponised Compliance: the prioritisation of anti-racist signalling over public safety has repeatedly left dangerous individuals on the streets to avoid potential administrative critique.
• Censorship Regimes: national police standards require the monitoring and investigation of lawful speech under the guise of non-crime hate incidents.
• Hypocritical Leadership: current political elites demonstrate blatant double standards by lecturing foreign governments while silencing domestic criticism regarding institutional collapse.
• Migration Consequences: uncontrolled influxes of foreign nationals have correlated with a surge in brutal violent crimes and the erosion of social cohesion.
• Civilisational Decay: an obsession with multiculturalist dogmas has prioritised the comfort of progressive ideologies over the fundamental duty of protecting the citizenry.

LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-20260507) summary:

• Technological Expediency: military developers justify the integration of artificial intelligence into lethal systems as a necessary survival mechanism against current battlefield threats.
• Automation Arms Race: global powers are accelerating the deployment of algorithms across military networks, effectively ceding critical decision-making responsibilities to machine processing speeds.
• Policy Vacuum: governmental oversight attempts to frame rules for autonomous warfare remain reactive and largely ineffective against the rapid pace of proprietary technological advancement.
• Targeting Efficiency: militaries increasingly rely on machine-led intelligence gathering to identify and strike objectives, reportedly increasing operational tempo and combat lethality.
• Human Oversight Myth: the transition from active human command to passive human monitoring undermines accountability, as operators are reduced to mere verifiers of machine-generated suggestions.
• Automation Bias: psychological dependence on sophisticated digital interfaces creates a high risk of operators blindly trusting machine assessments, potentially overriding individual tactical judgment.
• Legal Impunity: traditional international laws and civilizational norms are currently insufficient to define or prosecute war crimes committed by complex, automated, or distributed intelligence systems.
• Ethical Compromise: despite academic, religious, and international warnings regarding lethal autonomy, stakeholders treat humanitarian concerns as secondary to the pursuit of tactical advantage in active, high-stakes conflicts.

An image from an infrared camera shows Russian soldiers fleeing a burning vehicle as a drone piloted by Lasar's Group closes in. Lasar’s Group/National Guard of Ukraine

By

Daniel Michaels

and

Anastasiia Malenko

June 19, 2026 12:00 pm ET

Ukrainian drone maker Oleksiy Babenko knows that supercharging his weapons with artificial intelligence opens a Pandora’s box of killer robots. But the chief executive of startup Vyriy sees an even worse choice.

“Either robots will kill us in 50 years, or the Russians will kill us in a year,” he told a recent gathering of AI-arms makers in Kyiv. 

Of all the fields AI is upending, few have deeper ramifications for humanity than its role in warfare. Advanced algorithms have quickly swung from playing a supporting intelligence role to acting as agents of death. 

“Future combat will be largely robotic. It will be automated,” former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, who now invests in military-drone companies, said recently on stage at an expo. “It will be controlled by the laws of war.” 

Schmidt’s robot prediction draws little dispute. Less certain is whether last century’s rules can handle warfare’s future.

The war in Iran and AI advances have driven home the dizzying implications of military automation for Washington—and for civilians everywhere. The White House is racing to hammer out policies while the tech world and moral authorities chime in. The cacophony is yielding more questions than answers. 

Ukrainian drone maker Skyfall runs an attack drill in central Ukraine earlier this month. At the last moment the drone operator calls out, ‘Cancel attack.’ Photo: Serhii Korovayny for WSJ

President Trump this month issued an executive order on AI in national security that calls for aggressive use of the technology but requires it to operate “in accordance with applicable laws, government policies, and guidance.” 

The order, which directs the Pentagon to update AI rules adopted only three years ago, sought to bring clarity just as the administration amped up a fight with AI leader Anthropic, whose systems the Pentagon uses. That fight exploded in January over who gets to limit applications of AI in combat and surveillance, and escalated over the weekend. 

“The combination of AI and autonomous weapon systems demands an entirely new approach to risk analysis, risk mitigation, and risk acceptance,” said retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, who led the Pentagon’s first big AI application, Project Maven.

Throughout history, innovations including gunpowder, chemical weapons and airplanes have repeatedly rewritten rules of combat. Only the atomic bomb sparked a civilizational dilemma comparable to AI. And as with nuclear weapons, militaries have entered an automation arms race along a path they can’t foresee. 

U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, left, in 2020. Office of the Secretary of War Public Affairs

Now, with algorithms controlling not just weapons but entire military networks, humans are ceding wartime judgment to machines on an unprecedented scale. What’s even more worrisome to many: Armed forces are making up the rules as they go along.

---

Maven’s Legacy

AI entered combat in 2017, when Shanahan’s team used it to nab ISIS bombers attacking U.S. forces in Iraq. Maven’s success leveraging algorithms to scan reconnaissance images proved AI’s potential. Then efforts went quiet as the U.S. pulled back from foreign wars. 

Around 2023, drone makers supplying Ukrainian forces ramped up development of AI to lock onto targets, while commanders began to weave it into targeting systems. Israel, after the Hamas militant attacks that October, tapped AI to sift through mountains of intelligence. The Pentagon, meanwhile, deployed AI-based systems to streamline decision-making. China and Russia have also incorporated AI into military systems.

Today, AI-guided weapons can autonomously home in on objectives a controller picks. That selection generally happens when weapons approach a target, involving a few drones with limited firepower. 

Soon, though, swarms of drones will independently cross great distances by air, water or land to hunt down and strike targets without human intervention. And targets won’t necessarily be on a battlefield.

Killing isn’t AI’s only military assignment. Its role is ballooning across all the less-visceral chores that militaries tackle, particularly in giving priority to intelligence for selecting targets. U.S. commanders say they are selecting targets at more than 10-fold the tempo in Iraq. In the Ukrainian National Guard’s Khartia Corps, automation has tripled the pace of missions, said its top drone engineer.

Serhii Korovayny for WSJ

Serhii Korovayny for WSJ

Drone specialists from Khartia Corps working on recent drone models near Kharkiv, Ukraine, in April. Serhii Korovayny for WSJ

As warfare automation increases, its use is being guided more by battlefield objectives than by codified rules of engagement. At one extreme, Russia is deliberately targeting Ukrainian civilians with both cutting-edge and traditional weapons, seeking to sow terror that no digital regulations will curtail. 

Ukraine, in contrast, lacks resources and wants to maximize each strike’s pain for the Kremlin, meaning collateral damage is often wasteful. For Kyiv, AI can boost efficiency.

At a Ukrainian drone unit called Lasar’s Group, where soldiers hunt high-value Russian targets on AI-enhanced computer images, the new technology is just another tool, said a seasoned pilot who goes by the call sign Sid.

“I understand that I’m setting fire to a vehicle with a crew inside,” said Sid. He isn’t bothered that automatic systems keep targets in his drone’s deadly clutches.

“It’s still a person who presses the button,” he said. “It’s a person who decides whether to activate the system or not.”

That role—dubbed “the person in the loop”—is at the crux of fears about combat automation. Where in the loop is that person? What role do they play? Can they keep pace with computers? 

Technology is advancing so rapidly that even the term itself has morphed into “the person on the loop”—a monitor more than a link in a digital chain.

Concerns over human interactions with AI this year prompted Anthropic to seek explicit Pentagon guarantees that its systems wouldn’t be used for mass domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons, sparking administration backlash. 

Pentagon officials say fears are misplaced because weapons aren’t fully autonomous—and letting technophobia hamstring commanders’ use of AI poses a bigger risk.

“You always have the human who will analyze the situation” and make battlefield judgments on safety and tactics, said Defense Department Chief Digital and AI Officer Cameron Stanley, at the AI+Expo, a recent technology jamboree in Washington organized by a foundation created by Eric Schmidt. 

“The most dangerous course of action right now is to stand still and to remain in a human-driven world,” Stanley said. “The one thing that I am very worried about in war is trying to minimize mistakes.” 

---

Humanity in War

International Committee of the Red Cross legal adviser Noa Schreuer isn’t sold. Standing in the AI expo’s trade-show hall, amid displays from Amazon.com, Meta and Microsoft, she questioned safety precautions for automated weapons.

“Would an autonomous drone abort a mission on its own, for example if a child enters the target area?” she asked.

A dog-like robot outside the International Red Cross Group's booth at the AI+ Expo in Washington in May. DanIEL Michaels/WSJ

Schreuer was staffing the Red Cross stand—the expo’s buzz-kill. Across its mock battle zone spread a big green sign reading “Humanity in War.” On one faux demolished concrete slab hung a poster-sized page from the Geneva Convention, with rules on protecting civilians. On another hung a fake traffic sign for drone operators reading: “Don’t Outsource Your Authority/Maintain human control and judgment.”

Child deaths in AI-age war aren’t an abstract ethical question. Early in U.S. attacks on Iran this year—as Pentagon officials boasted how new technology was letting them identify and hit targets faster than ever before—Iranian authorities accused the U.S. of striking a school, killing more than 160 people, many of them children. The Pentagon is investigating whether U.S. forces hit the school, which sits near an Iranian military compound, and whether AI was involved.

Automated targeting systems have drawn suspicion, and murkiness around their use means they risk getting blamed no matter what happened. If AI systems offered up the school as a target, investigators must understand what went wrong. If targeters didn’t consult their AI tools, which can instantly scan troves of intelligence, questions will focus on why they didn’t—and whether technology could have helped avoid the civilian deaths.

Israel’s use of AI has drawn similar suspicion, when local media in 2024 alleged that the military was using automated systems to select targets with minimal human oversight and in violation of existing international law, killing large numbers of civilians. The military denied the allegations and issued a detailed defense, saying the systems, code-named Lavender and The Gospel, “are merely tools” for intelligence.

They “do not replace the intelligence analyst,” the Israeli military said. 

But even if AI doesn’t supplant intelligence analysts, can it influence them, or soldiers and commanders? 

That question vexes former Royal Netherlands Air Force Apache attack helicopter pilot Roy Lindelauf, who is now a professor of data science in the department of intelligent systems of Tilburg University. Working from a converted 19th century Dutch locomotive-assembly hall, he and colleagues are trying to mesh this century’s technology with military thinking from the last one. 

“There are so many levels to decision-making,” and how AI figures into them isn’t well understood, said Lindelauf, who also teaches at the Netherlands Defense Academy. 

One concern: People tend to trust what computers tell them, a phenomenon known as automation bias that is being reinforced by lifelike and apparently authoritative digital interfaces. “Even if AI is only a tool, how the human mind works should be taken into account to address biases,” he said. 

In other words, while we think we’re controlling AI, it may actually be controlling us. 

Ukrainian drone maker Skyfall tests their AI-powered drone by aiming for a mannequin target in central Ukraine earlier this month. Serhii Korovayny for WSJ

Skyfall pilots demonstrating their drones’ capabilities. Serhii Korovayny for WSJ

Designing responsible AI was the focus of a report former Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof launched at the U.N. General Assembly in September. The Netherlands in 1899 hosted a watershed conference, on Laws and Customs of War on Land, that laid the foundation for modern laws of war.

How AI fits into those aging rules puzzles commanders. Estonian defense adviser Eva Sula works with military leaders across the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who pepper her with questions nobody can answer. A common one: If I make a mistake because of AI, who is responsible?

“A war crime in the digital space? No country can prosecute it,” said Sula. “They don’t have the laws.”

---

Human and Machine

For now, many practitioners are improvising. 

Ukraine accepts battlefield risks linked to AI because “the ethical framework is just now being developed,” said Danylo Tsvok, chief executive of the Defense Ministry’s AI warfare center, A1.

Ukraine’s fighters are learning automation’s limits amid combat’s unpredictability, said a serviceman who is part of a team developing AI tools to analyze reconnaissance more quickly. AI can’t yet respond to unconventional situations, he said, and for now “waging war is an art—intuition.”

Stanley, the Pentagon digital and AI officer, said he wants to account for the mistakes that humans and machines can each make alone: “What I am trying to implement is the best human-machine team possible.”

But AI experts foresee surging capabilities and are worried. Pope Leo recently issued an encyclical on AI that built on the work last September of a panel of Nobel laureates, tech specialists and other luminaries the Vatican had assembled. They offered principles and red lines, including a plea that “AI systems must never be allowed to make life-or-death decisions, especially in military applications.” 

Illuminated drones light the sky during the 'Grace For The World' concert in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City. Stefano Spaziani/ZUMA Press

The conclave was part of a bigger Vatican event that concluded with a free concert in St. Peter’s Square and a light-show of more than 3,000 drones in the night sky.

Panel member Marco Trombetti, chief executive of AI-translation company Translated, said the group’s 18 members agreed that “if these things get used for war, they cannot be stopped.” 

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the June 20, 2026, print edition as 'AI Warfare Is at the Point of No Return. What Now? AI Warfare Opens a Pandora’s Box on the Battlefield'.

Anastasiia Malenko is a contributor to The Wall Street Journal covering the war in Ukraine, focusing on how it has reshaped Ukrainian society. She is based in Kyiv. She previously covered the war as a breaking news correspondent for Reuters and a reporter for the Kyiv Independent, the leading English-language newspaper in Ukraine.

Anastasiia graduated from Stanford University with degrees in political science and economics.

Daniel Michaels is Brussels Bureau Chief for The Wall Street Journal. He was previously German Business Editor, also overseeing coverage of the European Central Bank. For 15 years before that, he was the Journal’s Aerospace & Aviation Editor for Europe, covering airlines, aviation and aerospace industries in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Before that, he covered Central & Eastern Europe for the WSJ, based in Warsaw.

Before joining the Journal, Daniel worked as a management consultant in New York, Warsaw and Moscow. 

LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-20260507) summary:

• Additive Potential: three dimensional printing supposedly allows batteries to fill irregular spaces within devices to optimize volume and capacity.
• Industry Stagnation: traditional manufacturing methods have seen negligible improvements over three decades, relying on rigid pouch or cylinder formats.
• Chemical Agnosticism: the additive approach claims compatibility with various energy storage chemistries including lithium ion, sodium ion, and solid state variants.
• Startup Graveyard: numerous firms attempting to disrupt established battery giants face the inevitable failures inherent in pursuing cost and scale competitiveness.
• Military Dependence: developers are currently tethered to defense contracts as the primary funding conduit, given the disregard for economic viability in battlefield applications.
• Operational Efficiency: some innovators aim to abandon solvent based drying ovens to trim production overheads, hoping to bypass standard industrial bottlenecks.
• Experimental Speculation: radical concepts such as printing batteries from lunar soil remain theoretical exercises for future moon bases, illustrating the usual academic detachment from practical reality.
• Long Term Evasion: advocates suggest that commercial mass adoption remains decades away, keeping these technologies safely confined to laboratories and niche military projects.

By

Christopher Mims

9

---

Startup Material Hybrid Manufacturing is working to 3-D-print batteries inside SkyRaider drones. Joe Ailinger

There’s a revolution in battery technology hiding in plain sight: The 3-D printing of batteries has the potential to put energy storage inside any device. This will enable lightweight and long-lasting consumer gadgets, long-range military drones and even nanoscale robots.

The way the world manufactures batteries has changed hardly at all in 30 years. Almost all the innovations we regularly hear about—from cheaper, tougher electric-vehicle batteries to “Holy Grail” solid-state batteries—are about changing the chemistry of batteries.

The promise of battery-tech 3-D printing (aka additive manufacturing) is simple: What if batteries could fill any available space, even structural elements of our gadgets, rather than always taking a rigid shape like a pouch or cylinder?

The new approach has obvious appeal. The entire airframe of a drone could be filled with energy storage for increased range. Smartglasses could have sleek battery-packed frames, so they look like everyday eyewear rather than “Revenge of the Nerds” props.

One of the biggest advantages of 3-D printing is that it works with any battery, regardless of its cell chemistry. It could advance today’s lithium-ion as well as emerging sodium-ion and solid-state tech.

A 3-D-printed battery component made from simulated moon dust and astronaut waste. ESTRELLA/The University of Texas at El Paso

In 2025, researchers published around 25,000 papers about 3-D printing of batteries and their components, yet only a handful of startups have even proposed commercializing the technology.

Attempting to beat existing battery giants has doomed many a company to the graveyard. New battery tech must compete on lifespan, durability, energy density, safety and cost—which is dependent on massive scale.

Some are trying to use 3-D printing to create efficiencies in existing battery manufacturing systems. A brave handful of startups are pursuing radical new designs and approaches. They’re starting with defense applications, where cost and scale are less of an issue.

The airspace less traveled

Gabe Elias, chief executive of Miami-based 3-D-printed battery startup Material Hybrid Manufacturing, was an engineer on the Mercedes-AMG Formula One team for six years. During that period, the team won several championships led by driver Lewis Hamilton.

Elias was tasked with figuring out how to squeeze batteries into small and unlikely places—including directly under Hamilton’s seat. He couldn’t do it with existing tech. Years later, he was introduced to Christopher Reyes, who developed a battery printing tech for his doctoral thesis at Duke University, and the two founded the company.

Material's custom-built, hybrid 3-D-printing machine for making batteries. MATERIAL

Material has already 3-D-printed test battery cells in the lab, using a variety of ingredients, to prove the tech works with different chemistries. “Our approach is, instead of innovating on the chemistry side of things, let’s innovate on the way that the batteries are made,” says Elias. “Chemistry innovation is happening all across the industry.” 

Material recently announced a $7.1 million seed investment round and a $1.25 million contract with the U.S. Air Force.

By the end of August, the company plans to hit the next milestone in its Air Force contract by creating prototype batteries for Teledyne Flir’s SkyRaider drone. The drone maker could only cram in four packs of conventional lithium-ion batteries. By printing the batteries into the same space, Elias says the drone could get a 35% increase in energy storage.

A better process

At Silicon Valley-based Sakuu, the approach is more conservative than Material’s, but has the potential to show up in commercial batteries much sooner. Rather than trying to 3-D-print whole batteries, the company is working on replacing one of battery manufacturing’s biggest pain points, says Arwed Niestroj, Sakuu’s chief operating officer, who is also a nuclear physicist and former head of Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America.

Sakuu is developing a dry process for manufacturing electrodes intended to replace a costly industry-standard system. Sakuu

Existing battery assembly lines include football-field-long ovens for drying layers of material that have been dissolved in solvents. This requires a huge amount of energy and is a significant contributor to manufacturing costs, a big reason EV batteries aren’t cheaper.

Sakuu’s process, under development for years, uses additive manufacturing to lay down key battery components without solvents, eliminating the need for ovens, says Niestroj.

Sakuu is currently working to commercialize this tech with a major battery manufacturer—Niestroj didn’t say who, or when those cells would go on the market. Previously, Sakuu said it had a joint development partnership with Korean battery giant SK On to bring this system to market.

Radical designs

The world is full of battery designs that can make traditional lithium-ion look like the D cells in a 1980s boombox. But most are stuck at the laboratory stage.

Alexis Maurel, a researcher at the University of Texas at El Paso, has published fundamental research on this topic. In support of NASA’s push to return to the moon, he proposed a radical technique using lunar regolith—literally, moon dust—to print batteries for future moon bases.

Maurel says it typically takes about 20 years from the conception of a new battery technology to its commercialization. He’s already been at it for 10. But he’s excited by what’s to come: A number of auto manufacturers are hard at work on “structural” batteries, which means the battery pack itself helps hold the vehicle together.

Cylinders within the Wright Electric aluminum-air batteries, which achieve many times the energy storage capacity of traditional lithium-ion. Ben Hertzberg

For Malta, N.Y.-based Wright Electric, 3-D printing was key to enabling the manufacturing of an exotic battery type known as aluminum-air.

Aluminum-air batteries have off-the-charts storage capacity but can’t be recharged. They’re useful for remote military applications, where soldiers can use them to recharge an ever-growing array of electronic devices. (Used packs are either tossed or returned to base to be remanufactured.)

Wright Electric CEO Jeff Engler says his company, like Material, focuses on the military as the best customer for the expensive, still-nascent “ultra high-performance” 3-D-printed batteries.

The drone-centric wars popping up all over mean a need for more lightweight craft like those already in use in Russia, Ukraine and the Strait of Hormuz, says Engler. At the same time, militaries are also seeking ways to maximize space and minimize weight in larger aircraft, he adds.

Long before our consumer gadgets are built with fully customized energy-storing materials, 3-D-printed batteries will evolve in one of history’s most reliable tech incubators: the military.

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Christopher Mims is a columnist who writes about technology for The Wall Street Journal's tech bureau in San Francisco. The subjects of his columns vary widely from one week to the next. He has written about bidets, brain implants, the cult of the founder, the history of technology, innovation, venture capital, robotics, batteries, energy, materials science, wireless communications, AI, data science, telepresence, microchips, logistics, IT, 3D printing and autonomous boats, trucks, cars, drones and flying taxis. Christopher joined the Journal from Quartz, where he also covered technology. He has won a Sabew award for commentary, and has written a book, “Arriving Today” on how supply chains work.

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Videos

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s socialist dream for New York City is facing a wake-up call – in the form of a cash crunch and spiraling borrowing costs from investors who are increasingly alarmed over his Marxist experiments, On The Money has learned.

Mamdani – who has proclaimed that he will “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism” – balanced his $124.7 billion annual budget as required by New York law with a series of gimmicks, so-called one-shot revenue raisers that included delaying some pension payments. 

The result, On the Money has learned, includes a looming cash shortage that has been signaled by City Comptroller Mark Levine. As earlier reported by Melissa Russo of NBC 4, the amount of money the city has on hand is alarmingly low, and risks drying up altogether come November.

Wall Street is getting nervous – increasingly so about what Mamdani is looking to accomplish and how. Accordingly, it continues to demand higher interest rates on debt. That’s the case not only with long-term debt, but also the usually super-safe, short-term variety. 

My municipal market sources confirm the squeeze. Since the beginning of the year (when Mamdani took office) the so-called “spread” or difference between triple-A short-term bonds, and those issued by NYC with a maturity of one year has jumped nearly 20%.

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That skittishness is also reflected in the 13.7% spike in longer dated, 10-year debt, the so-called risk premium investors are demanding to finance all that collectivist warmth.

And it may be why the mayor’s office isn’t tapping short-term borrowing markets to make up for the looming cash deficit, Wall Street analysts tell On The Money. Instead, as Russo has reported, City Hall has played with delaying payments to nonprofits to ride out the storm and god knows what else as it scrambles for funds. 

A City Hall rep didn’t respond to On The Money’s request for comment.

True, this does happen from time to time with big, profitable companies who tap short-term borrowing markets to keep the lights on and paychecks flowing until revenues start to perk up. But NYC isn’t a big profitable company; its budget is growing to pay for Mamdani’s socialist dreams.

As I have written previously on these pages, the result is that taxpayers are fleeing. They’re being replaced by poor immigrants who tap into its extensive welfare state. Mamdani is an avowed socialist, doubling down on all of the above.

Richard Farley has a particularly firm grasp of the city’s fiscal problems and how Mamdani’s policies are making them worse and potentially unsustainable. Gotham could be heading toward financial Armageddon, he warns.

He’s a Wall Street lawyer who specializes in debt, and a historian of the city’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s. His book, “Drop Dead: How a Coterie of Corrupt Politicians, Bankers, Lawyers, Spinmeisters, and Mobsters Bankrupted New York, Got Bailed Out, Blamed the … as Usual,” should be required reading for people in government.

Farley tells me the logical recourse would be short-term borrowing, selling debt that expires in less than a year, known as tax or revenue anticipation notes. But “they don’t want to tap the anticipation notes markets because the high interest rates will make news,” he adds. 

“They are low on cash because they underestimated expenses to make an unbalanced budget look balanced.”