ROME – As the use of autonomous weapons systems becomes an increasingly prominent feature of modern warfare, including in both Ukraine and Gaza, the Vatican is backing new restrictions on these AI-driven “lethal autonomous weapons,” often known by the acronym “LAWs.”
Italian Archbishop Ettore Balestrero, the Vatican’s Permanent Observer to the United Nations in Geneva, argued for a moratorium on the development of weapons systems that can make firing decisions without human intervention — often dubbed “killer robots” — during an Aug. 26 address to a group of experts meeting in the Swiss city.
“It is profoundly distressing,” Balestrero said, “that, adding to the suffering caused by armed conflicts, the battlefields are also becoming testing grounds for more and more sophisticated weapons.” In particular, he insisted that autonomous weapons systems can never be considered “morally responsible entities.”
“The human person, endowed with reason, possesses a unique capacity for moral judgement and ethical decision-making that cannot be replicated by any set of algorithms, no matter how complex,” Balestrero said, according to a report in Vatican News, the Vatican’s official state-sponsored news agency.
The Vatican’s push comes as Josep Borrell, the EU’s top foreign policy official, pressed a gathering of foreign ministers in Brussels to allow Ukraine to use weapons supplied by EU member nations to attack Russian targets.
“The weaponry that we are providing to Ukraine has to have full use, and the restrictions have to be lifted in order for the Ukrainians to be able to target the places where Russia is bombing them. Otherwise, the weaponry is useless,” Borrell told reporters.
While most of the combat between Ukraine and Russia is being waged with conventional weaponry, observers say the conflict has also become a laboratory for testing new armaments, including AI-driven autonomous systems. According to a July 12 report in the New York Times, Ukraine has become “a Silicon Valley for autonomous drones and other weaponry.”
“What the companies are creating is technology that makes human judgment about targeting and firing increasingly tangential,” that report said. “The widespread availability of off-the-shelf devices, easy-to-design software, powerful automation algorithms and specialized artificial intelligence microchips has pushed a deadly innovation race into uncharted territory, fueling a potential new era of killer robots.”
Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, told the Times that “these technologies are fundamental to our victory,” confirming that autonomous drones have already been used to strike Russian targets. He also said the Ukrainian government is investing heavily in such systems in order to ramp up development and production.
At the moment, the autonomous drones being used in the Ukraine war still require a human being to lock on a target, with some military commanders expressing concern that without such a failsafe, software programs could malfunction and end up targeting their own forces. Nonetheless, many observers expect that human role to become superfluous as AI-based technologies become more sophisticated, as well as cheaper and more widespread.
According to multiple reports, autonomous weapons are also part of the Israeli arsenal being deployed in its ongoing conflict in Gaza.
Even before the current fighting with Hamas began, Israel was employing an automated sentry gun system to monitor the border fence with Gaza, capable of identifying targets and suggesting action without human intervention. It also uses an AI system called “Habsora” to identify bombing targets inside Gaza, which is said to be capable of doing so at a rate much higher than manual detection.
In that context, Balestrero made a distinction between a “choice” and a “decision,” arguing that the latter is a human act that involves weighing ethical considerations such as human dignity.
He called for international agreements governing the use of LAWs, saying they’re necessary “to ensure and safeguard a space for proper human control over the choices made by artificial intelligence programs: human dignity itself depends on it.”
“No machine should ever make the decision to take a human life,” Balestrero said.
This is not the first time the Vatican has condemned the use of autonomous weapons. In 2018, Balestrero’s predecessor in Geneva, Croatian Archbishop Ivan Jurkoviĉ, supported a ban at a UN conference.
“In order to prevent an arms race and the increase of inequalities and instability, it is an imperative duty to act promptly: now is the time to prevent LAWs from becoming the reality of tomorrow’s warfare,” Jurkoviĉ said at the time.
