Military AI Needs Technically-Informed Regulation to Safeguard AI Research and its Applications

Abstract

Military weapon systems and command-and-control infrastructure augmented by artificial intelligence (AI) have seen rapid development and deployment in recent years. However, the sociotechnical impacts of AI on combat systems, military decision-making, and the norms of warfare have been understudied. We focus on a specific subset of lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) that use AI for targeting or battlefield decisions. We refer to this subset as AI-powered lethal autonomous weapon systems (AI-LAWS) and argue that they introduce novel risks -- including unanticipated escalation, poor reliability in unfamiliar environments, and erosion of human oversight -- all of which threaten both military effectiveness and the openness of AI research. These risks cannot be addressed by high-level policy alone; effective regulation must be grounded in the technical behavior of AI models. We argue that AI researchers must be involved throughout the regulatory lifecycle. Thus, we propose a clear, behavior-based definition of AI-LAWS -- systems that introduce unique risks through their use of modern AI -- as a foundation for technically grounded regulation, given that existing frameworks do not distinguish them from conventional LAWS. Using this definition, we propose several technically-informed policy directions and invite greater participation from the AI research community in military AI policy discussions.