In this instance the article does say "An ambitious Pentagon plan to field thousands of cutting-edge drones to prepare for a potential conflict with China has [...] struggled to find software that can successfully control large numbers of drones, made by different companies, working in coordination to find and potentially strike a target—a key to making the Replicator vision work."

So these particular "AI weapons" would appear to be munitions.

Yes, I see great potential in injecting your AI into the enemies communication system. Being able to have an AI try and persuade your enemy to do things in your favor, confuse them, or censor information all processed in real time and potentially at scale of the enemy's entire army is very powerful. It could even take a passive role and serve as pure intelligence gathering of the current state of things.

I feel like a lot of those other uses are more aligned to the three letter agencies for intelligence and influence if were talking mostly about gen AI. I assume the next best place (excluding munitions and their delivery systems) would be cyber operations. But this realm is touchy and the leaders don't want to start a shooting war with cyber retaliation/strikes. The oversite, need for human in the loop, and aversion to collateral damage make AI weapons difficult to develop and deploy, especially if we earent counting older computer vison etc. It's no surprise the military is having trouble developing and deploying AI weapons in that environment.