US and Russia strip human-oversight safeguards from UN 'killer robots' pact

US and Russian diplomats worked together to strip key safeguards from a draft United Nations treaty on lethal autonomous weapons, removing provisions on predictability, ethics and human oversight of AI-generated targets, The Washington Post reported on Saturday.

Diplomats from around the world gathered in Geneva earlier this month under the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons to finalise what would have been the first international treaty regulating lethal autonomous weapons — AI-powered systems capable of making life-or-death decisions on the battlefield. But on the final day of talks, the negotiations took a sharp turn.

Over roughly 15 hours, American and Russian diplomats stripped out a series of provisions designed to put guardrails around the use of AI in weapons systems, according to the Post, which cited three people familiar with the negotiations and documents it reviewed. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the closed-door talks.

The two countries removed language that would have required AI weapons systems to operate in a predictable and reliable manner, eliminated a clause mandating that ethical considerations be factored into their use, and struck a provision that would have required humans to review AI-generated military targets before any strike could be carried out.

The changes took place in a closed-door session where UN cameras had been switched off and civil society observers were not permitted in the room. Both the American and Russian delegations brought roughly 10 lawyers apiece — nearly double the legal presence fielded by other countries at the table. One person familiar with the talks described the process as “death by a thousand paper cuts”, Times Now reported.

Human Rights Watch said in a September 7 dispatch that the final text also cut language on design standards and narrowed the agreement’s scope from international law generally to international humanitarian law only. A record 76 nations back turning the non-binding text into a binding treaty. The US State Department, Russian Foreign Ministry and the UN did not respond to the Post’s requests for comment.

Sources

• The Washington Post (via Times Now), “‘Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts’: How US, Russia ‘Gutted AI Weapons Rules at UN’”, 27 September 2026
• Human Rights Watch dispatch, 7 September 2026