Armed Forces: Health Services
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what progress the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory has made in developing AI triage decision-making in battlefield military medicine in conjunction with the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Answered by Luke Pollard
As reported in the press, experts from the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) are collaborating with the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) using hardware and methodologies developed under DARPA's In the Moment (ITM) fundamental research programme. AI systems do not naturally align with humans and the ITM programme aims to develop technologies to enable such alignment. Battlefield medical triage is a research use case within this wider programme.
In October 2025 Scientists from Dstl and their US counterparts at DARPA ran pioneering UK trials to understand whether medical staff would trust and delegate triage decisions to AI systems aligned with their own priorities.
The trials showed that having an aligned AI increased the likelihood of delegation, potentially allowing triage to be carried out more quickly and ultimately helping medical staff treat more casualties with the integration of trusted AI.
Further trials will take place later this year.
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