How does military AI use affect safety and oversight?

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1. 1

   Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Ethics, and the Military: A Canadian Perspective

   AI Magazine (Wasilow & Thorpe)Published Mar 1, 2019Checked Oct 6, 2026

   “Artificial intelligence and robotics could provide solutions to a wide range of military gaps and deficiencies. At the same time, the unique and rapidly evolving nature of AI and robotics challenges existing polices, regulations, and values, and introduces complex ethical issues that might impede their development, evaluation, and use by the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). Early consideration of potential ethical issues raised by military use of emerging AI and robotics technologies in development is critical to their effective implementation. This article presents an ethics assessment framework for emerging AI and robotics technologies. It is designed to help technology developers, policymakers, decision makers, and other stakeholders identify and broadly consider potential ethical issues that might arise with the military use and integration of emerging AI and robotics technologies of interest. We also provide a contextual environment for our framework, as well as an example of how our framework can be applied to a specific technology. Finally, we briefly identify and address several pervasive issues that arose during our research.”

2. 2

   Iterative Assessment for Military Artificial Intelligence (AI) Systems

   T.M.C. Asser Press eBooks (Kwik)Published Jan 1, 2026Checked Oct 6, 2026

   “In practice, many such incidents will be characterised as ‘accidents’—a reality of war that International Humanitarian Law is expected to tolerate. This paper challenges that assumption, arguing that even a priori unpredictable AI failures can be mitigated—if not prevented—through an iterative approach. By systematically integrating insights from post-deployment assessments, this approach enables decision makers to update their understanding of edge cases and other ‘known unknowns’ that emerge during real-world use, providing essential insights to inform future AI deployment. It proposes an Iterative Assessment framework—implemented through two complementary mechanisms: Iterative Review and Iterative Assessment in Deployment. This framework represents best practice for managing uncertainty and minimising civilian harm in the use of military AI. While initial accidents may be unavoidable, their recurrence can be significantly reduced through a structured iterative process of reporting, analysis, and adaptation. Those committed to the responsible use of military AI should embed this framework as a core component of operational planning and legal compliance.”

3. 3

   The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Military Operations

   arXiv (Cornell University) (Drapier et al.)Published Sep 22, 2026Checked Oct 6, 2026

   “The ethical challenge posed by these systems is fundamentally epistemic: not just whether autonomous weapons should be permitted to kill, but whether the conditions for responsible human judgment can survive when critical functions are delegated to opaque algorithms. We show that this epistemic condition produces a concrete accountability gap: responsibility diffuses across designers, operators, and policymakers while International Humanitarian Law presupposes capacities for judgment that current AI systems lack. To address this gap, we propose a governance framework that proceduralizes ethical constraints through named accountability roles, adversarial auditing with undisclosed benchmarks, tiered deployment thresholds, and a proposed NATO evaluation standard. Counterfactual analysis of eight documented cases (1988-2025) shows that each governance mechanism addresses a documented class of failure, but no single safeguard suffices in isolation: effective governance of military AI requires not only technical constraints but the institutional infrastructure to keep human judgment meaningful.”

4. 4

   Establishing human responsibility and accountability at early stages of the lifecycle for AI-based defence systems.

   Ethics and information technology (Conn & Bode)Published Oct 6, 2025Checked Oct 6, 2026

   “However, this is not precisely the case for AIS. Rather than focusing first on the system in its comparatively most autonomous state, it is more helpful to consider when, along the lifecycle, humans have more clear, direct control over the system (e.g. through research, design, testing, or procurement) and how, at those earlier times, human decision-makers can take steps to decrease the likelihood that an AIS will perform 'inappropriately' or take incorrect actions. In this paper, we therefore argue that addressing many arising concerns requires a shift in how and when participants of the international debate on AI in the military domain think about, talk about, and plan for human involvement across the full lifecycle of AIS in defence. This shift includes a willingness to hold human decision-makers accountable, even if their roles occurred at much earlier stages of the lifecycle. Of course, this raises another question: "How?" We close by formulating a number of recommendations, including the adoption of the IEEE-SA Lifecycle Framework, the consideration of policy knots, and the adoption of Human Readiness Levels.”

5. 5

   ‘Autonomous’ Weapons and Human Control

   T.M.C. Asser Press eBooks (Boogaard & Roorda)Published Sep 5, 2020Checked Oct 6, 2026

   “There is an ongoing debate on whether and how the use of certain emerging weapon technologies perceived as decreasingly allowing human control over the use of force should be regulated or banned. The focus of the debate on such so-called autonomous weapon systems has from the outset been too narrow and misguided. The frame of ‘autonomy’ and the resulting weapon-centric focus on control, neglects that the effects of the military use of weapons may be controlled in many more ways than by restricting certain weapons or technologies. This chapter argues that the legal requirement to exercise control over the effects of the use of force, may be complied with by virtue of a range of (human) decisions preceding, during and even after employment of a particular weapon.”

6. 6

   Autonomous Weapons Systems and Meaningful Human Control: Ethical and Legal Issues

   Current Robotics Reports (Amoroso & Tamburrini)Published Aug 24, 2020Checked Oct 6, 2026

   “Main approaches to MHC are described and briefly analyzed, distinguishing between uniform, differentiated, and prudential policies for human control on weapons systems. Summary The review highlights the crucial role played by the robotics research community to start ethical and legal debates about autonomy in weapons systems. A concise overview is provided of the main concerns emerging in those early debates: respect of the laws of war, responsibility ascription issues, violation of the human dignity of potential victims of autonomous weapons systems, and increased risks for global stability. It is pointed out that these various concerns have been jointly taken to support the idea that all weapons systems, including autonomous ones, should remain under meaningful human control (MHC). Main approaches to MHC are described and briefly analyzed. Finally, it is emphasized that the MHC idea looms large on shared control policies to adopt in other ethically and legally sensitive application domains for robotics and artificial intelligence.”