Russia Removes UN AI Safeguards

Russia has taken a major step toward regulating “killer robots,” after the Kremlin alongside the US pushed to strip ethical and human-oversight safeguards from a U.N. treaty. The draft agremement on autonomous weapons took place during closed door talks in Geneva earlier this month.

US and Russian negotiators pushed through the changes during a closed-door session after three years of talks under the U.N. Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). This marks the furthest progress yet toward establishing international rules for autonomous weapons, according to HRW. The rights group said the revised draft also removed language on predictability, reliability and design standards and narrowed the treaty’s scope from all international law to international humanitarian law.

Cameras were turned off and observers were excluded during the agreement, according to people familiar with the talks cited by The Washington Post.

Russian and US delegations also deployed legal teams nearly twice the size of those from other countries during about 15 hours of last-minute negotiations.

Nicole van Rooijen, executive director of the advocacy coalition Stop Killer Robots, accused Washington and Moscow of seeking to weaken the draft, while human rights groups warned that the changes could reduce accountability for civilian casualties caused by autonomous weapons.

The Washington Post also reported that the US and Russia removed a provision that would have required humans to review AI-generated targets before a weapon carried out a strike.

Speaking to reporters this morning Trump told Fox News: “You know what I want him to do? Make a deal. I want him to settle with Putin and I want Putin to settle with him.”