Lethal Autonomous Weapons (LAWS)

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) announced a €1 billion venture capital fund for technologies including AI.

A weaponized AI system intended to protect students has been grounded. Axon, which makes law-enforcement equipment such as tasers and body cameras, canceled a plan to sell remote-controlled drones capable of firing electroshock darts.

The U.S. Department of Defense issued new ethical guidelines for contractors who develop its AI systems. The Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, which issues contracts for AI and other high-tech systems, issued guidelines that contractors must follow.

Recommendations from the National Security Commission on AI were enshrined in over 190 laws in 2021.

War is already bad enough. What happens when human combatants are replaced by machines?

A remote sniper used an automated system to take out a human target located thousands of miles away.What happened: The Israeli intelligence agency Mossad used an AI-assisted rifle in the November killing of Iran’s chief nuclear scientist,

Machine learning researchers tend to trust international organizations, distrust military forces, and disagree on how much disclosure is necessary when describing new models, a new study found.

Autonomous weapons are often viewed as an alarming potential consequence of advances in AI — but they may already have been used in combat. Libyan forces unleashed armed drones capable of choosing their own targets against a breakaway rebel faction last year.

Drone startups are taking aim at military customers. As large tech companies have backed away from defense work, startups like Anduril, Shield AI, and Teal are picking up the slack. They’re developing autonomous fliers specifically for military operations.

A panel of AI experts appointed by the U.S. government came out against a ban on autonomous weapons. A draft report from the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence recommends against a proposed international global prohibition of AI-enabled autonomous weapon systems.

A fighter pilot battled a true-to-life virtual enemy in midair. In the skies over southern California, an airman pitted his dogfighting skills against an AI-controlled opponent that was projected onto his augmented-reality visor.

Some politicians and pundits believe that, in the AI era, the military with the most data wins. A new analysis disputes this notion. A report by Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology examines the relative strengths of the Chinese and U.S. militaries in AI.

An autonomous fighter pilot shot down a human aerial ace in virtual combat. Built by defense contractor Heron Systems, the system also defeated automated rivals from seven other companies to win the AlphaDogfight trial.

A consortium of top AI experts proposed concrete steps to help machine learning engineers secure the public’s trust. Dozens of researchers and technologists recommended actions to counter public skepticism toward artificial intelligence, fueled by issues like data privacy.

A prominent AI researcher has turned his back on computer vision over ethical issues. The co-creator of the popular object-recognition network You Only Look Once (YOLO) said he no longer works on computer vision because the technology has “almost no upside and enormous downside risk.”