The UK is looking to allow AI-based weapons systems to kill without the approval of a human being.

Al Carns, the armed forces minister, said there are circumstances where AI-powered weapons systems can make targeting decisions for themselves.

Speaking to the FT from the sidelines of a drone conference in Riga, Latvia, he said: ‘I always say there must be a human in the loop.

‘But you must have the ability to take the human out of the loop when required, because our adversaries won’t care about having a human in the loop.’

The UK’s current military policy on the matter, published in 2022, said there should be ‘context-appropriate human involvement’ in the selection and engagement of targets.

And a government submission to the UN’s Office of Disarmament Affairs in 2024 claimed that the UK does not possess any fully autonomous weapon systems, defined as armaments that ‘that operate without context-appropriate human involvement or outside of human responsibility and accountability, and has no intention of developing them.’

The UN bluntly states of autonomous weapons systems: ‘No state should develop or deploy such systems.’

And the international body’s secretary-general António Guterres said these systems are ‘politically unacceptable and morally repugnant.’

But with the rapid adoption and development of drones in warfare, many states across the world, including the UK, are looking to redraw what once may have been considered a red line.

Cairns said at the drone summit that some British weapons systems already operate with significant autonomy, including ‘missile systems [that] can fly forward and identify targets and strike them.’

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