Autonomous weapons that pick their own targets: UN and Red Cross urge a treaty before November's vote

The next decision on whether lethal autonomous weapons get a treaty is scheduled for November in Geneva, and on Tuesday the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross made a public case that the meeting needs to start negotiations.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres and ICRC president Mirjana Spoljarić Egger, in a joint statement released Tuesday, warned that the world is "dangerously close" to crossing a "moral red line" on machines that select and attack targets without a human in the loop. They framed November's meeting of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), a UN-hosted forum that has debated autonomous weapons for roughly a decade, as the moment states either launch formal treaty talks or leave the field to voluntary national rules.

The weapons in question, formally called lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS), are defined by the ICRC as weapon systems that select targets and apply force without human intervention. They are not the same as remote-controlled drones, where a human operator still pulls the trigger. They are closer to a system that, on its own, identifies a target and decides to engage.

No state has publicly confirmed battlefield use of a fully autonomous weapon, the joint statement notes, but the technology has moved fast enough that the UN and the ICRC now treat the question as urgent rather than speculative. Drone warfare in Ukraine and the Middle East, where the line between human-operated and increasingly autonomous targeting is blurring, is the recurring example both Guterres and Spoljarić Egger cite as the accelerant.

That context is what makes November matter. The CCW meets in Geneva, and member states are scheduled to decide whether to convene negotiations on a new, legally binding instrument. The joint statement lands on the deadline the same institutions set in their original 2023 call, when they gave the world until 2026 to wrap up talks. Three years later, the call has been reiterated, sharpened, and pinned to a specific calendar moment.

Guterres and Spoljarić Egger did not call for a finished treaty by November. They called for the start of negotiations, the same step arms-control talks took for landmines and cluster munitions. In a blog post two weeks before the joint statement, Eberechukwu Owuamanam, a Jesuit scholastic and humanitarian practitioner, made the humanitarian case more bluntly: "the machines must not choose who dies."

What the November meeting can and cannot do is the part the wire coverage tends to skip. A vote to launch negotiations does not write a treaty. It opens a multi-year process, with the hardest questions (which functions should be banned, which restricted, what compliance looks like) deferred to whatever body the CCW sets up. A vote against, or another procedural delay, leaves the existing patchwork: voluntary national policies, regional pledges, and a decade of CCW guiding principles that have produced no binding rules. The pattern of CCW talks on autonomous weapons is itself part of the joint statement's argument for moving faster.

The two institutional leaders are also leaning on dissent inside the field. The joint statement highlights that scientists and engineers building the underlying systems have themselves raised alarms about where the technology is heading. The lever to set limits still sits with governments.

The two organizations are pitching this as a closing window rather than a fresh alarm. Guterres and Spoljarić Egger asked for "political courage" to start the process, and the harder fight, getting a treaty through the CCW's consensus rule, has not yet begun. Coverage from Euronews and RTÉ on Tuesday carried the warning. The substantive question is whether states use November to begin the work, or extend a decade of voluntary principles.