AI will not set its own limits in warfare. States must.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being developed at extraordinary speed, prompting warnings from within the technology industry itself that advances may be outpacing our ability to understand and control its risks. Nowhere are the stakes higher than in armed conflict. As militaries increasingly explore the integration of AI into weapons and military decision-making, technological capability can easily be mistaken for inevitability: if a system can be built, the assumption follows that it will eventually be deployed. History suggests otherwise. States have made choices before about which technologies of warfare to prohibit, constrain or refrain from using – and they face such a choice again today.

In this post, ICRC Director of International Law, Movement and Partnerships Cordula Droege argues that abstract debates about the need to address the risks of AI should not distract from a concrete and achievable task already before states: establishing legally binding rules on autonomous weapon systems (AWS), including those incorporating AI. Drawing on the realities of deploying complex technologies in the unpredictable conditions of armed conflict, she explains why technical safeguards alone cannot resolve the humanitarian, legal and ethical concerns raised when weapons select and apply force without human intervention. Ahead of the Seventh Review Conference of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in November, she calls on states to turn more than a decade of work into clear prohibitions and restrictions on AWS, while there is still time to decide what role machines and algorithms should play in war.