Drones will need to be programmed with moral guidelines as AI-driven decision making reduces human involvement in autonomous warfare, according to a former UK spy chief.<\/p>\n
David Omand told the Guardian that he had changed his mind on unmanned weapons systems, more than a decade after concluding that autonomous drones could not comply with international humanitarian law.<\/p>\n
The former head of GCHQ<\/a> \u2013 the UK\u2019s listening agency \u2013 said he now believed AI could create a \u201cmoral\u201d framework for unmanned weapons that could differentiate between combatants and civilians.<\/p>\n Omand said he been swayed by the \u201cspeeding-up\u201d of modern warfare, as shown by the deployment of weapons such as drones and hypersonic missiles, and the emergence of generative AI which had given states a \u201cpotentially ethical way\u201d of allowing drones to operate under morally compliant systems.<\/p>\n \u201cMy call is to really get some work done on this, so that we\u2019re not left in a situation where there isn\u2019t a moral component built into future AI-powered weapon systems,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n His intervention came as the armed forces minister Al Carns said there might be circumstances where machines made their own targeting decisions, saying \u201cyou must have the ability to take the human out of the loop when required\u201d.<\/p>\n David Omand will speak at the Cheltenham science festival. Photograph: Steven May\/Alamy<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the US is leaning heavily<\/a> into AI-powered warfare. Its 2027 budget, released in April, sets aside $54bn (\u00a340bn) to fund \u201cautonomous and remotely operated systems across air, land, and above and below the sea\u201d, including a \u201cdrone dominance\u201d programme. The former CIA director David Petraeus, however, has argued that the US has no military doctrine for autonomous formations.<\/p>\n Speaking to the Guardian before an appearance at the Cheltenham science festival on Wednesday, Omand said AI technology was now capable of weighing the factors that go into a human drone operator\u2019s targeting decisions, such as whether a target was legitimate, whether there would be civilian casualties and whether the target has been correctly identified. This was not inventing new ethics, added Omand, but putting the current one used by the military into a form that can be deployed by a machine.<\/p>\n AI is already featuring heavily in recent US military missions<\/a>, with technology developed by Palantir and Anthropic being deployed to help shorten the \u201ckill chain\u201d \u2013 the process from selecting targets to launching a strike \u2013 in the Iran conflict.<\/p>\n