Search: battlefield robots
02 Mar (Ir-)Responsible by Design? Corporate Guardrails and the Governance of Military AI
...undermining both the capacity and willingness of human operators to act ethically. With LLMs, this problem may well significantly intensify. For the foreseeable future, LLMs should likely be nowhere near a targeting decision loop. While it is laudable that Anthropic has so far held firm in its guardrails, we should expect nothing less for companies that produce AI models that are technically unreliable and have the capacity to produce legally and ethically questionable outcomes on the battlefield. But is this enough or does it merely distract from deeper discussions on...
16 Jul Symposium on PMSCs: AI Broke the Code – The International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers and Emerging Technologies
...interpretations, and value judgments into their hardware, software, and user interfaces.” These embedded decisions shape how a tool will operate under battlefield conditions—and, more troublingly, whether it can be audited or constrained when it veers off course. If, as Rebecca Crootof and BJ Ard have suggested, technology “regulates through its ‘architecture’,” then the Code must shift upstream. It should impose obligations not merely on how technologies are used, but how they are conceived, developed, and trained throughout the lifecycle of a product or service. The existing text already offers a...
12 Mar AWS in the Cross-Hairs: Data Centres as Targets
...that international companies are complicit in an ‘economy of genocide’, including the provision of cloud services to the IDF for use in Gaza by Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Google, as well as Palantir, which is involved in providing Artificial Intelligence Platform for real-time battlefield data integration in predictive identification of Palestinians to be detained. Lawfulness of Targeting Data Centres Concern over digital spaces in IHL have traditionally been explored in relation to cyberwarfare and hacking. Indeed the Tallinn manuals have made great strides to consider the application of IHL...
15 Nov “How Do You Feel Today?” Exploring IHRL and IHL Perspectives on Law Enforcement and Military Uses of Emotion Recognition Technology
...this sense, possible interferences with privacy rights should also be part of the “legal review” Article 36 AP I requires for the introduction of new weapons, means, or methods of warfare. ERT could be considered as an equipment/system ‘used to facilitate military operations’ – i.e. a means of warfare, whose compatibility with ‘any […] rule of international law’ has to be verified. However, leaving aside these issues for a moment, other reasons could instead justify the deployment of ERT on the battlefield. As suggested by cinematographic advertising videos on advanced...
22 Apr Training the RSF? Due Diligence, Unlawful Intervention, and Criminal Exposure in Sudan’s War
...of a prohibited use of force. This distinction is central to assessing the legal consequences of alleged Ethiopian support to the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan. Even absent direct battlefield control, structured military training provided to an armed group fighting a foreign government may fall within the scope of prohibited intervention. Even if structured military training were to cross the threshold into a prohibited use of force, the further question arises whether it would amount to an “armed attack” within the meaning of Article 51 of the Charter of the...15 Oct BU Law School’s “Ten Years In” Conference
...version of this Hoover Institution article on the evolution of the debate over whether there is a “legal geography of war.” I extended it a bit to cover the latest twist in the debate, noted by Charlie Savage in his New York Times coverage. This is the internal debate between State and Defense lawyers over whether there is a legal notion of a “hot battlefield,” outside of which not even members of “associated forces,” such as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, that are belligerent with respect to the United...28 Jun That Syria War Power Debate, Continued
...stake (say, protecting the interest of regional stability), and so long as the strikes were limited in scope and duration (i.e. less than “war”), all of these actions could be said to fall within the scope of Article II, whether defense of battlefield allies was among the expressly named interests or not. Yet there are at least three ways in which this ‘third party defense’ notion may be said to go beyond even the broad 2011 OLC conception of presidential power: (1) I am not aware of any previous practice...
30 Apr AI and Machine Learning Symposium: Humanity-Centric AI for Armed Conflict–A Contradiction in Terms?
...crafting and implementing AI strategies for battlefield use and beyond, and the ICRC is right to include AI and machine learning for use in armed conflict as a key challenge in our contemporary landscape. Those states that have published specific military AI strategies, such as France or the US, typically stress two aspects from the outset: first, that AI is set to change the way wars are fought in a significant manner, and second, that AI will yield tremendous benefits to military organisations across a range of domains, such that...11 Aug Frozen Conflicts Unfreezing
...as they are for local, tactical, battlefield use to shred opposing infantry) at villages with large concentrations of the wrong ethnicity, in order to drive them out. On the Abkhaz side, the Russians had supplied plenty of clandestine fighters. We met some of them staying in the Abhaz capital – they described themselves as ex-KGB, which is to say, they had gone out of formal government service and were being paid as private contractors, in dollars into foreign bank accounts. They called themselves defenders of the ethnic-Russian villages in Abkhazia,...25 Feb Drones as Strategic Airpower and the Light Cavalry?
...the use of a missile fired from a drone in battle significantly different from a missile fired from a manned aircraft, or a helicopter, or some other place. Critics who call the practice extrajudicial execution, however, are frequently focused upon another scenario. The version of it analytically furthest from the hot battlefield scenario is a CIA directed drone missile strike upon a target in a compound far away from any theatre of active fighting, such as AfPak — someone in Yemen or Somalia, to take the obvious examples. From the...