International talks on rules for AI-based weapons hit snags

International negotiations to regulate artificial intelligence-based weapons are encountering difficulties, with Japan, Germany and others backing international rules on regulation but maintaining a cautious stance on a treaty to prohibit killer robots. Behind their muted approach is a fear that countries that develop autonomous weapons would shun such a treaty anyway, diminishing the significance of international efforts toward any regulation. Therefore, countries differ over how to attain this objective while agreeing on the need to prevent lethal autonomous weapons from running out of control. Germany hosted an online meeting in early April amid the COVID-19 pandemic to facilitate talks on the control of killer robots, as promoted by the U.N. Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). Representatives of more than 60 countries and regions, including the United States and Israel, both developers of AI weapons, the European Union and the United Nations, as well as nongovernmental organizations, logged in to participate in the forum.