The US Army wants to build cannon-fired missiles that will use artificial intelligence (AI) to hunt their targets, out of reach of human oversight.

C-DAEM, as the project is known, requires the weapon to hit moving and imprecisely located armoured targets whose exact position has high uncertainty.

Unlike laser-guided weapons, which strike a target highlighted by a human operator, C-DAEM will find targets for itself. To achieve this, a parallel project will aim to develop algorithms for the weapons. These will be similar to face-recognition algorithms, but will use infrared cameras instead of traditional ones as they are more accurate at identifying targets, such as tanks.

The weapons will have a range of up to 60 kilometres, taking more than a minute to arrive, and will be able to search an area of more than 28 square kilometres for targets. They will have a way to slow down, such as a parachute or small wings, which will be used while scanning objects below. The weapons will hunt for targets autonomously, deciding when they have found one and attacking without human intervention.