On 1–5 September, researchers from SIPRI’s Governance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Programme took part in a United Nations meeting focused on autonomous weapon systems. The meeting was held in Geneva within the framework of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS).
Researcher Laura Bruun and Senior Researchers Dr Alexander Blanchard and Netta Goussac monitored the debate. Two years into its three-year mandate, the GGE LAWS focused, during this debate, on building consensus around the characteristics of LAWS and the requirement for the human element in the use of LAWS.
As part of the visit, the researchers held bilateral discussions with states to share insights from SIPRI’s ongoing work—notably a project on the AWS policy process led by Dr Blanchard. In addition, Bruun, Blanchard and Goussac presented recent findings from a comparative study of AWS and AI-enabled decision support systems in military targeting. They also shared conclusions from a SIPRI-convened expert workshop, detailed in the report ‘Bias in Military Artificial Intelligence and Compliance with International Humanitarian Law’.
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