AI-Enabled Weapons & Ethics

What We Do

Developing a systems-based approach to ensure the ethical development and use of AI-enabled weapons.

AI-enabled weapons pose serious potential risks to humans’ ability to control violence. Ensuring that we have evidence-based practices in place to manage these risks is necessary to mitigate them and justify their use.

Meaningful progress on regulating and assuring the safety of AI-enabled weapons should begin with an appreciation that a weapon that relies on AI has a complex lifecycle comprising the operation of two systems. The first system culminates in fielding a weapon – that is, making it available to the military for potential use. The goal of this system is to deliver a weapon that is capable of being used ethically within the anticipated conditions under which a weapon will be deployed. The second system involves a targeting process that culminates in the use of a weapon. The goal of this system is to ensure that a weapon is used ethically once it is fielded.

Within each of those systems humans and AI collaborate in various tasks. The central question is how to ensure that human intention and human values inform performance of the tasks involved in the development and use of an AI-enabled weapon. With this conceptual framework as a point of departure, this project will engage stakeholders across industry, government, and international organizations to better understand the tasks in each system and the ethical salience of the human-machine interactions that perform them. Mapping the development and use of AI-enabled weapons in this way will sharpen dialogue on a range of key questions about governance of AI weapons, and provide a framework for devising ethical risk assessment tools and ethical risk management strategies for industry and regulators.

This project aims to move the ethics and regulatory conversations about AI-enabled weapons beyond the current impasse in addressing the potential risks of these weapons.

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