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The US and Russia weakened the UN's killer robots report, Human Rights Watch says

Ethics, predictability and reliability came out, but human control and judgment stayed in.

By Think Facility · September 28, 2026 · AI policy Military AI

In the early hours of September 5, 2026, a UN meeting in Geneva finished three years of work on autonomous weapons, and adopted a final report. Two days later Human Rights Watch said the report had been significantly watered down, and named two of the countries that did it. Russia and the United States, it wrote, "weakened the text by insisting on changes to widely supported provisions."

The talks ran under the Convention on Conventional Weapons, the CCW, in a working group of government experts that met for the last time that week. A Washington Post story brought the report back into the news this weekend, but its account of who pushed for what rests on people it didn't name, so this brief sticks to what HRW put its name to.

What came out of the text

According to HRW, the final version drops references to design and development. It narrows the scope from all international law to international humanitarian law. It cuts the reference to ethical considerations.

It also removes predictability, reliability, explainability and traceability.

HRW doesn't say which country asked for which cut. It names Russia and the United States among the states behind them, and says there were others.

Talks

CCW Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems

Ended

early hours of September 5

States backing negotiations

76, 70 of them High Contracting Parties

Next

the November CCW Review Conference

What stayed in

The report still describes what counts as a lethal autonomous weapon. It says human control and judgment are required to comply with international law, and it restricts systems that can't comply.

HRW counts 76 states that want to move to negotiating a treaty, and 70 of them are High Contracting Parties, a majority of the convention's members. It calls the watered-down text enough to start from.

We couldn't find the adopted text itself in the UN disarmament office's online library on September 28, so the list of cuts above is HRW's. States decide whether to open negotiations at the CCW Review Conference in November.