UN warns AI is taking over human decisions in warfare ahead of Geneva autonomous weapons conference

Artificial Intelligence

UN warns AI is taking over human decisions in warfare ahead of Geneva autonomous weapons conference

The warning comes weeks before a conference that could open negotiations on autonomous weapons, as Washington and Beijing agree on an alert channel and the EU excludes defence from its AI Act.

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Óscar Ruiz
Analyst in Security, Defense and Military Industry
Published on
26 October 2026 at 05:30

The director of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research posed the question openly in New York: “Are we going to let machines target and kill human beings?” Robin Geiss, who heads UNIDIR, warned last Tuesday that artificial intelligence is on course to displace human decision-making in warfare. His remarks came three weeks before <a href="https://reachingcriticalwill.org/resources/calendar/event/18082-seventh-review-conference-of-the-convention-on-certain-conventional-weapons-ccw” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>a conference that will decide whether to open negotiations towards a dedicated treaty on autonomous weapons.

AI is accelerating the pace of operations. Many of its systems also function as black boxes, and that opacity increases the risk of errors, miscalculations and unintended escalation. Geiss also identified geopolitical tensions as “serious obstacles” to regulating its military use. He provided no figures, however: this is an institutional warning rather than a quantitative assessment, and should be read as such.

UNIDIR wants to move from warnings to practical tools. Its Centre of Excellence for AI, Peace and Security is launching a forum on AI in the military domain this Thursday, the first of its kind within the UN system. It will focus on three areas: guidelines for companies developing AI-enabled military tools, a shared vocabulary for concepts such as autonomy and safety, and the risk of non-state armed groups using AI to plan operations. The industry guidelines will be voluntary, a significant detail.

Geneva, 16 November

The real action is in Geneva, rather than New York. In the early hours of 5 September, the Group of Governmental Experts under the Convention onCertain Conventional Weapons (CCW)concluded its three-year mandate by adopting, by consensus, a set of “elements” for a future instrument on lethal autonomous weapons systems. The convention has 128 states parties. According to Automated Decision Research, 76 countries already support negotiating on the basis of that text, including 70 CCW states parties.

The final text differs from the one initially proposed, and Human Rights Watch says it was significantly watered down. References to weapons design and development and ethical considerations disappeared, along with references to predictability, reliability and traceability. Its scope was narrowed from international law as a whole to international humanitarian law, and the organisation holds Russia and the United States responsible for those cuts.

These accounts require close scrutiny. HRW is part of the campaign to ban so-called killer robots and is not a neutral observer.Five international law specialists who followed the process write in Opinio Juris that there were proposals to dilute the text, but that the major military powers were not the progress, both accounts agree that, despite their shortcomings, these elements will form the basis of any future negotiations

The decisive moment will come at the Seventh CCW Review Conference, from 16 to 20 November.States parties will have to decide whether to approve a negotiating mandate. But the CCW operates by consensus, so a majority is not enough: a single country can block the decision.

Washington and Beijing go their own way

As the multilateral process moves at the pace of committee deliberations, the countries with the world’s two largest military budgets have devised a shortcut of their own. In September, Washington proposed a mechanism for notifying each other of AI incidents.Following the Xi–Trump summit in Washington, both governments announced on 26 September that they had agreed to establish it. A dedicated AI dialogue is scheduled for November.

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The Chinese statement was just one page long and did not explain how the channel would work or what would trigger its use. None of the sources consulted indicates that it explicitly covers military AI. The memorandum on crisis communication between the two militaries remains pending: it will be signed “as soon as possible”, with no date set. Trump also made clear that his country “will not hit the brakes” on AI.

It is a phone line for warning each other that something has gone wrong, rather than preventing it from going wrong in the first place.

Europe outside both tracks

In Geneva, decisions rest with individual states rather than the European Union, but the EU’s 27 members have set out their position. On 12 October, the Foreign Affairs Council adopted conclusions calling for “an ambitious negotiating mandate”, insisting that human control and judgement be maintained “throughout the entire life cycle” of these weapons, and advocating a ban on those that cannot comply with international humanitarian law, alongside regulation of the rest. However, it stops short of saying whether the instrument should be legally binding, leaving this “without prejudging its nature”.

In Geneva, Europe is calling for requirements on autonomous weapons that its own AI Act does not impose at home. Can it demand human control from others when it has excluded its own military systems from its legislation?

Geneva, 16 November

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UN warns AI is taking over human decisions in warfare ahead of Geneva autonomous weapons conference

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Geneva, 16 November

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Geneva, 16 November

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