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Notes -
Presumably, Skynet was indeed in the sky, i.e., space-based data centers, or the humans would have quickly just hit the data centers. Alternatively, Skynet, having the resources to build weapons and killer robots autonomously, would have also had the resources to build and fortify data centers - heck, its human designers may have even intended this.
The premise of the Terminator movie (the original, at least) is that Skynet was about to lose to a ragtag band of human rebels and needed to resort to time travel to have a chance of survival, so it seems quite likely that it didn't have space-based data centers, and was indeed quite vulnerable to humans quickly hitting the data centers. Presumably the nuclear war was enough to disrupt the humans initially, but once they formed a resistance they could start making meaningful progress? I don't think they had resources for aircraft/space launches though.
I'm not sure this is a useful model for future malicious AI, but this specific movie AI seems not to have solved that problem.
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