By Mike Ludwig
This article was originally published by Truthout
In a world where autonomous weapons can choose targets on their own, data can put us all at risk, a US veteran warns.
The United Nations and the Red Cross are warning that rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic weapons are bringing the world dangerously close to crossing a moral red line that has inspired dystopian science fiction for decades: the autonomous targeting of humans by deadly machines.
In an appeal to world leaders on August 25, the International Committee of the Red Cross and UN Secretary-General António Guterres renewed their call for a global treaty establishing restrictions on autonomous weapons systems. They warned that the technology behind AI targeting software and unpiloted drones has developed at record speed since the UN and Red Cross first called for such negotiations three years ago.
“At the same time, scientists and engineers developing these systems have themselves raised the alarm,” Guterres and the Red Cross said in a joint statement on August 25. “When the architects of this technology are calling for limits, States cannot afford to remain passive. This year must mark a turning point.”
In other words, the world must act now to rein in what are commonly known as “killer robots” or “slaughterbots” — unpiloted drones, robotic dogs, robot sentries armed with guns, AI targeting systems, and other digitally driven death machines that can identify, strike, and eliminate human beings on their own.
“You don’t even need drone operators; you can just type in a coordinate and not see the implications of what you are doing,” said Rory Fanning, an author, activist, and veteran of the U.S. war on Afghanistan, in an interview.
Killer robots no longer exist in the realm of science fiction. Autonomous weapons are increasingly being deployed on the battlefield, including in the wars funded and waged by the U.S. in Ukraine and Iran, respectively. While the U.S. and other militaries have flown drones with remote human pilots for years, AI targeting systems are being integrated into drones that can identify, track, and eliminate targets on their own.
“The same technology that brings you an Uber kills somebody in Palestine, and people really need know that and consider that,” Lisa Ling, a U.S. veteran who worked at the Pentagon’s drone program prior to 2012, told Truthout.
In Palestine, autonomous weapon systems are targeting and brutally killing people in Gaza and the West Bank as part of ethnic cleansing campaigns sanctioned by Israel’s far right government. U.S.-based companies such as Microsoft and Palantir face backlash for selling AI targeting platforms to the Israeli military, which has attacked and killed aid workers, journalists, first responders, and health care workers. The UN estimates that 30 percent of the people killed in what is broadly viewed as a genocide in Gaza are children.
Israel’s use of AI tools has contributed to digital dehumanization, the process of reducing human beings to data points used to make decisions that negatively impact their lives, according to the Stop Killer Robots campaign. Like the data sold by brokers to target consumers with specific ads online, the data used for targeting Palestinians is gathered from cellphones and social media, for example.
As Ling points out, a corporate spinoff of iRobot, the company that makes the popular Roomba robot vacuum, became a contractor developing autonomous weapons for the U.S. military in 2016. The spinoff was acquired by Arlington Capital Partners in 2016 for $45 million, but Ling said we should be alarmed that technology in consumer products and autonomous weapons comes from similar sources.
“Basically, the same company that [made] your Roomba is now a military contractor,” Ling said. “As a technician who worked inside the drone program, I would ask people to look at where the data that is being used for targeting is coming from.”
Matt Howard, the interim organizing director at About Face, an antiwar group for veterans, said Ling and other whistleblowers who previously worked with killer drones for the U.S. military have brought attention to the unique toll that working with such weapons takes on military personnel.
“There’s been a deep cost for people involved in those programs, both in terms of moral injury and trauma,” Howard told Truthout. “AI-driven, cloud-based warfare is this next phase we’re entering, and that has a ton of pretty scary implications.”
There is also a moral cost to the U.S. as a nation of voters. Howard pointed to a 2013 drone strike on a civilian wedding procession in Yemen that killed at least a dozen civilians, and the warrantless execution of a U.S. citizen by a drone strike in Yemen in 2011, as examples of attacks that desensitized the U.S. public to autonomous warfare under President Barack Obama — but had deep and lasting impacts on veterans.
“Americans end up caring less about the legal and moral implications once there isn’t a human being pressing the trigger, or in the cockpit, and it’s not so close to home,” Howard told Truthout. “Our leaders understand how this works and they exploit it — drone and AI-influenced warfare has involved the U.S. more deeply in extralegal warfare with disastrous consequences for civilians in Iran and too many other countries to list.”
On February 26, 2026, the first day of President Donald Trump’s war on Iran, a U.S.-guided Tomahawk missile struck a school for girls near a military facility in Minab, killing at least 156 civilians, including 120 schoolchildren. While Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have refused to admit U.S. responsibility, Democrats in Congress are investigating whether targeting AI software built by Palantir with Anthropic’s AI was used in what appears to be a horrific targeting mix-up based on outdated data.
While the U.S. was the first nation to deploy killer drones, the technology has become a sort of equalizer for smaller nations facing off against major militaries. Ukraine’s military became a world leader in drone innovation by fighting Russian invaders. In the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, Tehran has strategically deployed cheap drones to attack U.S. bases, deplete stockpiles of expensive U.S. interceptor missiles, and blockade oil shipments in the Strait of Hormuz, leaving Trump and Hegseth looking weak on the global stage.
Howard of About Face told Truthout that autonomous weapons remove humans from the decision-making process, leaving algorithms to make life-or-death choices that could cause future conflicts to spiral out of control. Some analysts fear the destructive potential of AI is on par with nuclear weapons, Howard said, and policy makers must learn lessons from the Cold War, when humanity faced the collective prospect of nuclear annihilation.
“You need people to be able to make the decision not to do a thing,” Howard said. “There are plenty of examples throughout history, including during the Cold War, when a human being decided maybe we are not going to push that button right now … and avoided full-on nuclear warfare.”
In their appeal to world leaders on August 25, the Red Cross and Guterres at the UN said nations must move beyond “incremental discussions” around autonomous weapons and take decisive action now toward global regulations or a treaty restricting their use. Nation-states have a responsibility both to the people suffering under current conflicts and future generations, they said, and negotiations must begin now:
A failure to act quickly and decisively will cost lives. It will leave future generations to inherit a world in which the absence of clear and specific prohibitions and restrictions on these weapons opens the door to practices that would erode the protections international humanitarian law is meant to guarantee … Future generations will ask whether leaders acted when there was still a chance to set limits before these weapons proliferated beyond control.
While it may be a political long shot in an age of rising authoritarianism and AI oligarchs, Fanning said we should demand our leaders establish a global ban on autonomous weapon systems not only to save lives, but also to preserve our humanity for future generations.
“Killing another human being is the most unnatural thing in the world to do, and the only way it can be done is creating distance between the person who is killing and the person who is dying,” Fanning said.
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