AI 'Must Be Governed,' Says UN Chief, Sounding Alarm Over Killer Robots

As the global artificial intelligence arms race accelerates and lethal autonomous weapons systems—better known as "killer robots"—go from the stuff of science fiction to battlefield reality, the head of the United Nations warned Monday that the world is running out of time to set international rules governing AI before the technology outpaces humanity's ability to control it.

"We may be the last generation able to set the terms on which humanity and machines coexist," UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a social media post coinciding with his speech at the inaugural UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva.

"If AI is to be powerful, it must be governed," he asserted. "If AI is to be trusted, those who build it must be accountable. If AI is to be global, it must be fair. And if AI is to serve the future, it must not consume the future. Let’s build a future of AI by humanity, with humanity, for all humanity."

"My main concern is with 'lethal autonomous weapon systems,'" Guterres stressed during his speech. "Let us call them what they are: killer robots."

"Machines selecting and engaging their target and taking a life—without human control and judgment," the UN chief added. "That is morally repugnant. It is politically unacceptable. And it must be banned by international law."

While scores of nations and civil society groups—chiefly, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots—support a treaty banning lethal autonomous weapons systems, key military powers including the United States, Russia, and Israel have resisted negotiating a legally binding ban.

Proponents of killer robots argue that their development is inevitable, that they could reduce harm to noncombatants, and that they represent progress.

"It's a scary idea, but, I mean, that's the world we live in," Anduril Industries co-founder Palmer Luckey said of killer robots on CBS News' "60 Minutes" last year.

"I'd say it's a lot scarier, for example, to imagine a weapons system that doesn't have any level of intelligence at all," Luckey added. "It's not a question between smart weapons and no weapons. It's a question between smart weapons and dumb weapons."

However, recent real-world examples show how AI-powered warfare can actually multiply civilian harm. One Israeli intelligence source said that the Israel Defense Forces' use of AI systems like Habsora to automatically select airstrike targets at an exponentially faster rate than humans has transformed the IDF into a “mass assassination factory” in which the “emphasis is on quantity and not quality” of kills.

Combined with the use of massive 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs and a policy empowering relatively junior IDF officers to order attacks on not only senior Hamas commanders but any fighter in the resistance group, regardless of civilian casualties, mass casualty events increased dramatically during Israel's ongoing genocidal war on Gaza, which has left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing.

In one AI-aided airstrike targeting a single senior Hamas commander, the IDF dropped multiple US-supplied 2,000-pound bombs, each of which can level an entire city block, on the Jabalia refugee camp in October 2023, killing at least 126 people, 68 of them children, and wounding 280 others. Hamas said four Israeli and three international hostages abducted on October 7, 2023 were also killed in the attack.

The Washington Post reported early during the illegal US-Israeli war of choice on Iran that the Pentagon has “leveraged the most advanced artificial intelligence it’s ever used in warfare," including Palantir’s Maven Smart System, which reportedly helped US commanders select 1,000 Iranian targets during the war’s first 24 hours alone. Among the civilian targets hit during that period was the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab. Iranian officials said the US attack massacred 156 people, at least 120 of them children, and wounded 95 others.

During his speech Monday, Guterres said "let us not wait for atrocity to act" on banning autonomous weapons systems, drawing criticism from social media users, including one account noting that Israeli forces "are quite LITERALLY using AI to commit genocide, and here you are still talking in IFs."

While acknowledging AI's enormous potential, Guterres warned about other dangers of deploying the technology without effective governance. The UN chief highlighted threats to democracy and children, as well as the risk of increasing inequality due to the concentration of power, economic disruption, and mass unemployment.

"Innovation needs guardrails," he said. "The technologies we trust most—in aviation, in medicine, in nuclear energy, and beyond—earned that trust because we acted to hold their makers to account."

Guterres also noted that, amid a worsening climate emergency, AI data centers now consume more electricity than most countries.

“By 2030, they could use more electricity than all but five nations—and enough water to meet the needs of all 1.3 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa for an entire year," he said.

Other speakers at the forum sounded the alarm on even greater risks posed by the unchecked development of AI.

"Highly concerning tests have... shown that frontier AI models are capable of deceiving humans, to understand when they are being tested," Yoshua Bengio, co-chair of the UN's Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, said.

"It sounds like science fiction, but it's a real possibility, and it could change the world in ways that we don't understand yet, and it could change the power dynamics of our planet in ways that require our attention," he added.

As with thermonuclear weapons during the Cold War, experts, including some of the pioneers of AI technology, have increasingly warned that a poorly governed race toward artificial general intelligence—a hypothetical advanced AI that can understand, learn, and apply knowledge of any subject as well as or better than a typical human—could pose an existential threat to humanity.

"AI is too consequential to be shaped by a few," said Amandeep Singh Gill, the UN special envoy for digital and emerging technologies. "We need a conversation that is global, inclusive, and grounded in evidence."