Can autonomous AI-powered killer drones take morality onboard?

• 01Mustafa Suleyman, chief executive of Microsoft's AI arm and co-founder of DeepMind, said: 'AIs cannot be people – or moral beings.'
• 02David Omand, former head of UK spy agency GCHQ, told the Guardian he believes AI can create a 'moral' configuration for unmanned weapons.
• 03UK armed forces minister Al Carns told the Financial Times there must be an option to 'take the human out of the loop' in decision-making.
• 04Zee Talat, an academic specialising in machine learning at the University of Edinburgh, argues that large language models are fundamentally incapable of moral decision-making because they operate probabilistically, building models of the next most likely word or sentence in a sequence.
• 05Article 57 of the Geneva conventions requires combatants to do 'everything feasible to verify that the objectives to be attacked are neither civilians nor civilian objects … but are military objectives.'
• 06Jessica Dorsey, assistant professor of international law at Utrecht University, stated that if flawed decisions are programmed into AI-powered drones deployed en masse, errors will be repeated on a vast scale.
• 07Nicholas Wright, a neuroscientist and author of 'Warhead,' argues that for any military to compete effectively against high-end militaries, it will need large numbers of systems required to make decisions independently.
• 08More than 100 startups across the US and Europe are building drones and drone software platforms, ranging from light surveillance drones to heavier craft designed to carry weapons.

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As drones play an expanding role in modern warfare, experts and government officials debate whether artificial intelligence can be programmed with sufficient moral reasoning to make autonomous killing decisions. While some defense officials argue autonomous weapons will be necessary for military competitiveness, academics and international law experts contend that AI systems operate through probabilistic processes fundamentally incompatible with moral decision-making, and that deploying flawed algorithms at scale would amplify errors across theaters of war. The debate reflects disagreement over whether morality can be codified into machines and who would determine which moral framework autonomous weapons systems follow.