'Killer robots' one step closer as Russia and US team up to strip safeguards from UN pact

'Killer robots' one step closer as Russia and US team up to strip safeguards from UN pact Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Russian and US delegations stripped out ethics and human-oversight safeguards in 15 hours of last-minute edits after three years of talks on AI weapons The US and Russia stripped safeguards from a draft UN treaty about AI weapons - weakening regulations over “killer robots” a rights group has said. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said that Russia and the US stripped out ethics and human-oversight safeguards from the treaty in a closed-door session in Geneva this month, just hours before negotiations were due to finish. After three years of talks under the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) US and Russian delegations pushed through changes and cut language on predictability, reliability and design standards, HRW said. The changes, which also narrowed the scope of the treaty from all international law to humanitarian law alone, were pushed through in a last-minute, closed-door session with cameras off and observers removed, the rights group reported. During roughly 15 hours of last-minute edits the Russian and US delegations fielded legal teams nearly twice the size of other delegations' to rush through the changes, the Washington Post reported. 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 let AI weapons select their own targets and reduced accountability for civilians who were harmed. 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. The new deal, despite being changed at the last minute, marks the furthest progress yet toward establishing international rules for autonomous weapons, according to HRW. A record 76 nations already back turning the nonbinding text into a binding treaty, according to HRW.