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Autonomous Weapons and Killer Robots: New Warnings, Old Habits

1 September 2026 Dr Binoy Kampmark AIM Extra , https://theaimn.net/autonomous-weapons-and-killer-robots-new-warnings-old-habits/

Another bleak warning, another round of Cassandra calls about humanity’s immaculate sense of destructive self. This month, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres and the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (ICRC) Mirjana Spoljaric Egger issued a joint appeal stating that, “We are now dangerously close to crossing a moral red line: the autonomous targeting of humans by machines.” Both insist that two types of autonomous weapons – unpredictable autonomous weapons and anti-personnel weapons – be prohibited.

In Geneva, the chief of disarmament affairs at UN Geneva, Mélanie Régimbal, held up the fort by reiterating the position taken by the UN that systems selecting or engaging targets and taking human lives in the absence of control and judgment “are politically unacceptable, morally repugnant and should be prohibited under international law.”

Laurent Gisel, head of the arms and the conduct of hostilities division at the ICRC, also spoke from Geneva, describing conflict as “not a story of precision, distinction and restraints” but one “of civilians killed, families displaced, hospitals, schools and homes destroyed at ever greater speed and scale.” In the thick fog of conflict, many variables could come into play. “A combatant can surrender or be wounded and therefore be protected from attack; civilians can enter the area of operations of the autonomous weapons systems; the weapons may encounter a situation that would not have been anticipated.” The dangers of unpredictability in such autonomous systems was hugely problematic. “If it’s not possible to predict it, then how is it possible to limit it?”

These are not remarkable warnings. The UN and ICRC had issued a joint appeal on the subject in 2023, calling upon States to negotiate a legally binding document by 2026. At the level of civil society, the Stop Killer Robots coalition was formed in October 2012 and publicly launched in 2013. The campaign, according to the group, focuses on fostering a world where “we respect each other’s inherent dignity”; take responsibility for choices regarding technology and how it alters the relationships between humans; develop technology to promote peace, justice, human rights, equality and respect for law; and where people work as activists “to build a society and overcome inequalities and systems of oppression.” This is fairly airy stuff, but central is the goal of developing and fortifying “social norms that reject autonomous killing by machine [sic] in warfare, policing, border control and other circumstances.” Control, responsibility, accountability are fundamental features.

That campaign has not made much meaningful progress of late. The faith placed by the military establishment in murderous machines remains an unshakeable one, with the idea of human control over decision making increasingly thinned in favour of the uncritical human consumer of data. That faith has effectively displaced the scrupulous, incredulous decision maker when it comes to acquiring and hitting targets. Within the first few weeks of the Gaza War, beginning on October 7, 2023, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) was making generous use of Lavender, an AI decision-support system (DSS) to generate 37,000 individual targets on a crude rating scale of significance depending on affiliations with armed groups. Other systems used in battle included The Gospel (Habsora), which generates target lists and Where’s Daddy?, a platform tracking the locations of individuals ahead of the strike. The resulting slaughter to scale tallied. Far from suggesting a seamless integration of human and machine, the IDF’s conduct suggests a misplaced optimism, and laziness, in deferring to the merits of a killing system.

The disagreement between the artificial intelligence firm Anthropic and the US Department of Defense over the dangerous limits of autonomous systems in war is another case in point. The falling out between the two players in the thanatotic economy was serious enough to see a concerted attempt by the Pentagon to blacklist the firm as a “supply-chain risk.” (This was found on August 27 by the US District Court of the Northern District of California to be an “unlawful retaliation” in violation of the First Amendment and a denial of due process as protected by the Fifth Amendment.) That falling out, however, is not necessarily a boon for those favouring limits on killer robots or fully autonomous military platforms. 

In a February 2026 statement, Dario Amodei, the company’s co-founder, conceded that the Pentagon, “not private companies”, made military decisions. “We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit our technology in an ad hoc manner.” Amodei, however, considers himself a politically sentient being, which begs the question as to why he is at the vanguard of denuding humanity’s role in making decisions, notably through encouraging Large Language Models (LLMs) that remove initiative, industry and inventiveness. AI, he claims, can “undermine” democracy, a goal he seems to be pursuing himself. Of personal concern was the use of the company’s technology for mass domestic surveillance, which presented “serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties” and the use of fully autonomous weapons “that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets.” But even here, his quibbles are brittle, given an admission that fully autonomous systems “may prove critical for our national defense.” The concern, it would seem, lay in the reliability of the systems available and whether they would harm American personnel. “We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk.” 

Two days after Amodei’s statement, the pre-emptive, joint illegal attack on Iran by the US and Israel commenced, seeing yet another gluttonous use of AI DSS. Targets were generated at speed by the US military’s resort to Palantir’s Maven Smart System, which integrates Anthropic’s Claude AI to assess surveillance data, generate lists of targets and prioritise them. “Many of the targets hit in Iran,” writes Noor Hammad of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), “have been civilian, including a school and healthcare and residential facilities, illustrating the risks of rapid target generation.” Think tankers can always be relied upon to offer the understatement and euphemism in equal measure.

Gisel has told reporters that there is, as things stand, no “confirmed evidence that autonomous weapons have been used to directly target human beings in the battlefield.” This is a distinction with little difference, given the deferential attitudes shown by the technology fetishists in the IDF, the Pentagon and other militaries. If the system says so, it must be right. There is also a risk that these calls for restraint and a legal system of control will simply fatten the detritus of worry without effect. Ahead of the seventh Review Conference of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) taking place in November, the human species is unlikely to take a pathway that does not first imperil it before seeking, irretrievably, to bottle the escaped genie. From the creation of atomic weapons to the threats of climate change, the worst will always come before any touted panacea. And that panacea, when it appears, is likely to be a mere palliative.

September 3, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment

The Transnational Technocratic Machine: Class War Behind The Flags

One Supply Chain, Multiple Flags

Military budgets in 2026 remain enormous. The U.S. national-defense request approached or exceeded $1 trillion when reconciliation and related measures are included (with the formal DoD request at roughly $961.6 billion). China’s official 2026 defense budget stands at approximately 1.94 trillion yuan, with central-government expenditure of roughly 1.91 trillion yuan—about a 7% increase. Russia’s 2026 military expenditure is budgeted at approximately 14.9 trillion rubles, equal to about 6.3% of GDP, according to SIPRI analysis of the wartime economy. Iran operates with a fraction of those resources but invests heavily in relatively inexpensive drones, missiles, and asymmetric systems.

These numbers are presented as national strength. In practice they recycle capital through the same commercial layers…….. The originating firm often never sees the final military end-user. The profit has already been taken at the commercial stage.

The technocratic class that designs the chips, owns the foundries, finances the distributors, and staffs the regulatory bodies benefits whether the final buyer is a Western defense prime, a Chinese state-linked enterprise, a Russian wartime manufacturer, or an Iranian procurement network.

 Gloria Guillo, Tortilla con Sal., August 31, 2026, https://www.tortillaconsal.com/bitacora/node/10200

How a Shared Global Technology Supply Chain Serves Transnational Elites Against Workers Everywhere

The story sold to populations is that the United States, China, Russia, and Iran are locked in geopolitical rivalry, each building separate military-industrial systems to confront the others. That narrative conceals the deeper structure. The weapons carry national markings. The technological base that makes them possible does not. Semiconductors, sensors, power electronics, microcontrollers, RF components, machine tools, and industrial equipment move through the same global commercial networks. Components pass through distributors, brokers, front companies, and third countries before they appear in missiles, drones, radar, or electronic-warfare systems on every side.

What looks like interstate competition is better understood as a transnational class project. A layer of technocrats—executives in semiconductor firms, private-equity and defense-finance networks, logistics conglomerates, and the political managers who write export rules and sanction lists—operates across borders. Their interest is not the security of any particular population. It is the continuous expansion of high-margin dual-use technology markets, the extraction of surplus from workers who fabricate and assemble the components, and the management of scarcity and conflict that keeps demand high. Workers in Taiwanese fabrication plants, Chinese assembly lines, American distribution warehouses, Russian military factories, and Iranian workshops are all inputs to the same circuit. The impoverished in every country pay the taxes, endure the austerity, and absorb the destruction when those circuits feed actual shooting wars.

One Supply Chain, Multiple Flags

Military budgets in 2026 remain enormous. The U.S. national-defense request approached or exceeded $1 trillion when reconciliation and related measures are included (with the formal DoD request at roughly $961.6 billion). China’s official 2026 defense budget stands at approximately 1.94 trillion yuan, with central-government expenditure of roughly 1.91 trillion yuan—about a 7% increase. Russia’s 2026 military expenditure is budgeted at approximately 14.9 trillion rubles, equal to about 6.3% of GDP, according to SIPRI analysis of the wartime economy. Iran operates with a fraction of those resources but invests heavily in relatively inexpensive drones, missiles, and asymmetric systems.

These numbers are presented as national strength. In practice they recycle capital through the same commercial layers. A processor or power-management chip does not know whether it will end in a consumer device or a guidance package. The same is true of sensors, memory, connectors, and machine tools. Once a component leaves the factory, layers of intermediaries can move it across sanctioned and non-sanctioned jurisdictions. Documented cases show U.S.-origin electronics reaching Iranian UAV and missile programs through Chinese and Hong Kong fronts (DOJ indictment of Chinese nationals), with parallel patterns for Russian systems and repeated Treasury designations of procurement networks involving China, Hong Kong, and other transit points. The originating firm often never sees the final military end-user. The profit has already been taken at the commercial stage.

This is not a conspiracy of one secret corporation. It is the ordinary functioning of a globalized production system in which dual-use technology is the most valuable commodity. The technocratic class that designs the chips, owns the foundries, finances the distributors, and staffs the regulatory bodies benefits whether the final buyer is a Western defense prime, a Chinese state-linked enterprise, a Russian wartime manufacturer, or an Iranian procurement network. National flags provide the political cover; class interest provides the continuity.

Workers as the Common Exploited Base

The labor that produces these components is performed by workers whose wages, conditions, and political power are systematically subordinated. Fabrication, packaging, testing, and logistics are concentrated in locations chosen for cost and control. The U.S. Government Accountability Office has documented that the Department of Defense relies on more than 200,000 suppliers and cannot fully identify where all of the microelectronics in the products it purchases are manufactured. According to Defense Department estimates cited by GAO, approximately 88% of microelectronics production and 98% of semiconductor assembly, packaging and testing occur overseas, primarily in Taiwan, South Korea, and China.

That overseas dependence is not an accidental vulnerability; it is a feature that allows capital to discipline labor by threatening relocation or by pitting workforces against one another under the banner of national competition. When governments announce new defense spending, the immediate beneficiaries are the contractors and their financiers. The money then flows downward into subcontractors, component makers, chemical suppliers, and logistics firms—extracting value at every step while the social costs of militarization (debt, inflation, environmental damage, and eventual battlefield casualties) fall on broader working populations.

Sanctions and export controls are presented as tools of national security. In practice they function as instruments of selective scarcity. They raise the price of dual-use goods, create rents for those who can navigate the gray markets, and force poorer states or sanctioned populations into more precarious procurement channels. The same networks that move restricted electronics also move the profits upward. Workers in the sanctioned economies face shortages and intensified exploitation; workers in the sanctioning economies face higher taxes and the ideological demand to identify with “their” military-industrial complex. The technocratic layer remains insulated.

Opacity as Class Power

Supply-chain visibility is weak even inside the largest military systems. The inability of major defense bureaucracies to map every microelectronic origin is not merely bureaucratic failure. Opacity protects the circulation of dual-use technology and the intermediaries who profit from it. When diversion occurs through shell companies and false end-user declarations, the system continues to function for capital while the political narrative of “adversaries” is maintained for domestic audiences. The real common denominator is not shared nationality but shared dependence on a commercial technology base controlled by a narrow transnational stratum.

Disrupting the Machine Means Disrupting Class Power

If the shared technological substrate is what enables large-scale militarization across rival states, then genuine disruption of war requires breaking the class monopoly over that substrate. Nationalist solutions—more sanctions, more domestic production under the same ownership structures, more spending funneled to the same contractors—reproduce the circuit. They merely rearrange which faction of capital captures the rents.

A class-oriented approach starts from the opposite premise: the workers who design, fabricate, assemble, transport, and maintain the dual-use base have no objective interest in feeding any military-industrial system. Their interest lies in converting that productive capacity toward social needs and in denying its conversion into instruments of destruction. That requires transparency forced from below, refusal of dual-use labor discipline, international coordination that ignores official enemy lines, and collective control over the lower tiers of the technological pyramid—the machine tools, specialized materials, and distribution nodes that currently serve capital’s ability to arm multiple sides.

The flags will continue to wave. The budgets will continue to be justified in the language of national survival. But the underlying circuit is class power operating through technology. As long as a transnational technocratic layer can move dual-use components across borders while workers on every side remain divided by nationality and subordinated by wage discipline, the capacity for industrialized war remains intact. Breaking that capacity means treating the supply chain not as a national security problem but as a site of global class conflict—technocrats and their state managers on one side, the workers who actually produce the material basis of modern warfare on the other.

September 2, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment

‘Let’s stop being suckers for Ukraine’ – Polish MEP

Kiev “spits into our face” by glorifying Nazi collaborators behind massacres of Poles, Ewa Zajaczkowska-Hernik has said

29 Aug, 2026, https://www.rt.com/news/644805-poland-ukraine-nazi-mep/ 

Warsaw should stop giving Ukraine free weapons as long as it glorifies Nazi collaborators responsible for massacring Poles, a member of the European Parliament has said.

Earlier this week, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky again called upon Kiev’s foreign backers to provide more Patriot missiles, citing an acute shortage of air defense munitions amid intensifying Russian strikes on military-related targets across the country.

Polish Deputy Defense Minister Pawel Zalewski told Ukrainian media on Thursday that Warsaw was ready to cooperate with Kiev on the production of Patriot interceptors for the needs of both NATO and Zelensky’s government.

In a post on X the same day, Zajaczkowska-Hernik expressed her frustration, saying: “More missiles for Patriots for Zelensky for nothing? Let’s stop being suckers for Ukraine!”

Warsaw has provided Kiev with some $4.6 billion in military aid since February 2022, supplying tanks and warplanes, among other things, and “should have pursued a transactional policy” towards Ukraine, she argued.

“We’re handing them valuable equipment and paying off their loans for them, and they spit in our face with the Banderite pantheon of heroes – what the hell is this?!” the MEP wrote.

Relations between Warsaw and Kiev deteriorated in June after Zelensky granted an active Ukrainian commando unit the honorary title “Heroes of the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army),” prompting outrage in Poland.

The UPA was the armed wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), led by Stepan Bandera, which collaborated with Nazi Germany during the early stages of its 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. UPA fighters massacred up to 100,000 ethnic Polish civilians in 1943-1944 in what is now western Ukraine, according to Polish estimates.

In recent months, the remains of two OUN co-founders – Andrey Melnik and Evgeny Konovalets – were exhumed in Europe and delivered to Ukraine to be reburied as part of a push by Zelensky to build a “Pantheon of outstanding Ukrainians.”

Warsaw warned Kiev that it will not support its bid to join the EU if it does not change its ways, while Polish President Karol Nawrocki stripped Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state honor.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week that the neo-Nazi nature of the Ukrainian government had become so visible that even the Polish authorities, who are gripped by Russophobia, cannot help but see it. According to Putin, Warsaw simply cannot ignore the “obvious demand” of its own population to address the issue.

September 2, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment

The threat of nuclear weapons is greater than ever. Here’s how international law can help

Gareth Evans,  August 27, 2026 https://theconversation.com/the-threat-of-nuclear-weapons-is-greater-than-ever-heres-how-international-law-can-help-290523

The outlook for nuclear arms control is desolate in all three of its dimensions – risk reduction, non-proliferation and outright elimination. The important agreements of the past are dead or on life support. And the recent behaviour of the actors that matter most – the United States, Russia and China – has fed concerns things can only get worse.

The nine nuclear-armed states possess between them more than 12,200 nuclear warheads, with a combined destructive capacity of more than 145,000 Hiroshima bombs. Some 9,000 of these are militarily active or deployed.

Alarmingly, some 2,000 US and Russian weapons remain on dangerously high alert, ready to be launched within a decision window for each president, if their country is perceived – rightly or wrongly – to be under nuclear attack, of just four to eight minutes.

The US and Russia, holding between them 90% of the global stockpile, dramatically downsized their inventories after the end of the Cold War. But that momentum has completely stalled. Every nuclear-armed state is now modernising or increasing its arsenal. This is especially true of China, whose inventory has doubled in a few short years to nearly 600 weapons, with new land- and seaborne delivery systems.

More troubling still, the longstanding taboo against the use of nuclear weapons may be weakening, with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in particular talking up this prospect in the Ukraine war in language not heard since the height of the Cold War. A number of states are considering using nuclear weapons – especially so-called “tactical” weapons – not just for deterrence but for warfighting.

As agreements die, the threat rises

The big arms-control agreements of the past, which – at least between the US and Russia – banned certain systems outright, set constraints on deployments and built confidence through transparency, are now dead. These include the Anti-Ballistic Missile and Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaties.

With the expiry in February 2026 of New START, the 2010 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, Russia and the US are without any limit on their nuclear forces for the first time in more than 50 years.

Moreover, crucial multilateral treaties are only barely alive. Both the US and Russia have withdrawn from the Open Skies Treaty. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, though operating in practice, has still not been finally ratified. Alarmingly, US President Donald Trump has floated the prospect of the US ignoring its prohibitions. And the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons is in as fragile a condition as it has ever been.

The loss of confidence in Washington’s willingness to deliver on its extended nuclear – or even conventional – deterrence commitment to close allies has led to serious discussion in South Korea, and even in some quarters in Japan, about the need to acquire their own nuclear weapons. Such conversations are also now beginning in Europe.

The safeguards system of the International Atomic Energy Agency is still reasonably functional, as are less formal restraint mechanisms such as the Nuclear Suppliers Group and Missile Technology Control Regime.

But about the only other good news on the non-proliferation agreement front is that regional nuclear weapon free zone treaties are continuing to hold their own in Southeast Asia (with China at long last agreeing to join), the South Pacific, Latin America, Africa and the Antarctic.

When it comes to nuclear disarmament, new heart has been given to campaigners by the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This treaty, agreed by 122 UN member states in 2017 and in force since 2021, bans nuclear weapons outright.

But there is less to it than meets the eye. There is still no prospect of it being signed or ratified by the states that matter: the nuclear-armed states, or the “umbrella” states (such as Australia) that believe themselves to be sheltering under their protection.

Moreover, nuclear disarmament discussion has become more complicated in recent years. This is due to the increase in dual-use systems, especially ballistic or cruise missiles that could carry either nuclear or conventional weapons, and the emergence of real concerns about the development of weapons in space, hypersonic weapons, lethal autonomous weapons, cyberwarfare and the impact of artificial intelligence generally. Multilateral agreements for most of these new areas have not been even conceptualised, let alone negotiated.

Why international law matters more than ever

There is much more international law applicable to the threat or use of nuclear weapons than just the various nuclear-specific treaties that are for the most part now dead or on life support. There is the large body of law, starting with the UN Charter, relating to the threat or use of force, prohibiting any cross-border aggression except in legitimate self-defence or with Security Council approval.

There is the 1996 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice that decided (albeit by the narrowest of majorities) “the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law”.

There is the mass of international humanitarian law, or law of armed conflict, which – particularly in its emphasis on necessity and proportionality – has huge implications for the conduct of nuclear operations. This includes targeting policy, and other dimensions of NC3 (nuclear command, control and communications) generally.

International human rights law, especially as embodied in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, has some potential application, as does international law relating to wanton destruction of the natural environment.

However, when it comes to the application of all this additional constraining international law – critically important as it is protecting the world from the insanity of nuclear conflict breaking out, or doing at least something to mitigate its horror if it does – the unhappy reality is that the whole concept of international law is under greater stress than it has been within any of our living memories. Of all the outrageous assaults on decency perpetrated by Trump, the nadir was possibly his New York Times interview in January 2026, when he said that “I don’t need international law” and that the only constraint on his power as president of the US was “my own morality, my own mind”

Depressing as all this may be, the last thing the world can afford to do – and that anyone with half an instinct for sanity and decency should want to do – is give up on international law. There is no more important time than now than to reinforce the perception that there is huge ongoing utility in understanding the critical role international law has played in the past, and can and should play in the future, in constraining the use of these weapons. They are the most indiscriminately inhumane ever invented and the only ones currently posing an existential risk to life on this planet.

In this context, the good news is there is an online course on Nuclear Weapons Law now on offer at the University of Sydney. It is open to all comers worldwide, and aimed at educating on all the ways in which existing international law constrains both the use and threat of use of nuclear weapons, and the critical importance of restoring its salience.

It is a long-overdue enterprise, one from which I am now acutely aware that I and my own generation of policymakers and practitioners would unquestionably have benefited.

August 31, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment

UN and Red Cross demand immediate global rules on autonomous weapons amid rising AI threats

[your]NEWS, Tue, 25 Aug 2026, https://www.sott.net/article/508094-UN-and-Red-Cross-demand-immediate-global-rules-on-autonomous-weapons-amid-rising-AI-threats

Leaders warn of moral and legal dangers as fully autonomous arms near deployment, urging binding treaties to prevent unchecked use in warfare.

The United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres and the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Mirjana Spoljaric, issued a joint warning on Tuesday, stating that the world is “dangerously close to crossing a moral red line: the autonomous targeting of humans by machines.”

“Negotiations must begin now to urgently adopt a legally binding instrument to regulate autonomous weapon systems with clear prohibitions and restrictions,” the leaders stated. Their appeal comes as states prepare to meet in Geneva next week to discuss potential new rules governing the use of AI-assisted and semi-autonomous weapons, which have already been deployed in conflicts in Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza, Iran, and the Gulf.

The discussions, which began in 2014, have seen some progress, but technological advancements have outpaced regulatory efforts. While fully autonomous weapons, such as anti-missile systems on warships, are already in use, there is no confirmed evidence of their deployment against human targets — yet.

Human rights groups have expressed concerns that AI-driven systems may not be adequately predictable or controllable, increasing the risk of fatal errors, such as failing to recognize injured or surrendering soldiers. Additionally, the lack of human oversight complicates accountability in potential war crimes cases.

“States must show political courage and move beyond incremental discussions towards decisive action,” the joint statement urged, pushing for formal negotiations to commence in November during a major review conference held every five years in Geneva.

Carolyne Mélanie Régimbal, chief of service at the U.N. Office for Disarmament Affairs, stated during a Geneva press briefing following the release of the joint statement:

“Some decisions must forever remain with the human being, none more than the decision of taking or not a human life.”

Although states agree that international humanitarian law (IHL) applies to lethal autonomous weapon systems, there are currently no specific binding international standards for these technologies. Opposition from major powers like Russia and the United States, who argue that existing laws are sufficient, has stalled progress. The Geneva talks, which require consensus to move forward, are taking place amid heightened geopolitical tensions and recent European withdrawals from treaties like the landmine ban, driven by Russian threats.

August 30, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment