--- title: "Red Cross Official Says AI Is Already ‘Amplifying the Destruction’ of War" description: "Laurent Gisel wants bans on autonomous weapons that target people, as a new UN effort on military AI gets underway." author: "rews desk" published: 2026-10-22T14:20:46Z modified: 2026-10-23T02:46:20Z url: https://rews.cc/a/red-cross-official-says-ai-is-already-amplifying-the-destruc-b462cc language: en tags: ["ai", "war", "gaza", "ukraine", "military", "world"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Red Cross Official Says AI Is Already ‘Amplifying the Destruction’ of War *Laurent Gisel wants bans on autonomous weapons that target people, as a new UN effort on military AI gets underway.* By rews desk · October 22, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/red-cross-official-says-ai-is-already-amplifying-the-destruc-b462cc ## In brief - ICRC legal official Laurent Gisel said AI is already amplifying the destruction and humanitarian harm of war - He urged bans on autonomous weapons that target people or act unpredictably, with strict limits on all others - The UN announced a military AI initiative on Tuesday that includes voluntary guidelines for industry - Mr. Gisel said some states removed predictability and reliability language from a draft in this summer’s talks - States will decide whether to open treaty negotiations at a CCW review conference in Geneva, Nov. 16 to 20 Laurent Gisel, a senior legal official at the International Committee of the Red Cross, said this week that artificial intelligence is already “amplifying the destruction” of war, and that diplomacy at the United Nations is not keeping up. Mr. Gisel, who heads the arms and conduct of hostilities unit in the ICRC’s legal division, was in New York to address the UN General Assembly’s disarmament committee. He said in [an interview with 404 Media](https://404media.co/ai-is-already-amplifying-the-destruction-of-war/) that states should ban autonomous weapons that target human beings or behave unpredictably, and should put strict limits on the rest. “The technology is developing at a pace that is very concerning,” he said. The technology is “amplifying the destruction, amplifying the violation of the law, amplifying the humanitarian harm caused by conflicts,” he said. On Tuesday the UN announced a new initiative on military uses of AI, run by the UN Institute for Disarmament Research. According to [OPB](https://www.opb.org/article/2026/10/20/new-un-initiative-will-aim-to-tackle-the-military-uses-of-ai/), it will draw up voluntary guidelines for companies that design military AI tools, along with an “AI security lexicon” to pin down terms like autonomy and safety. Robin Geiss, the institute’s director, said its new AI center had received funding from all five major nuclear powers. ![A giant microchip suspended from a chain crashes into stone buildings, while a fraying red string connects it to a small conference table.](https://rews.cc/img/09aa02fc7215727e5dfb9ee1903aeaa410ef79d5.webp) Mr. Gisel said “multilateral processes take quite some time” and “we already see the effects on the battlefield.” 404 Media reported that Israel used AI powered by Microsoft to choose targets in Gaza, and that Russian drones in Ukraine are using AI to decide which people to kill. Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, recently announced Project Meridian, an effort to guide future AI-powered autonomous weapons, with Elon Musk, the defense contractor Palmer Luckey and Newt Gingrich among its leads, the outlet reported. Speed worries Mr. Gisel most. Faster decisions are the main pitch for military AI, but they also mean faster mistakes. “Targets are created at higher speed and higher frequency, and are actually then prosecuted quicker, and with that give us great concerns in terms of the level of human control that is retained,” he said. “The human is supposed to remain in the loop.” That doesn’t always happen. The Israel Defense Forces told journalists it did not thoroughly vet the kill lists produced by Lavender, the AI system it used to pick targets in Gaza. ![A hand reaches toward a conveyor belt carrying paper human silhouettes as an industrial press stamps red circles onto their torsos.](https://rews.cc/img/6a650f1ee2ec0ce8d84253cd71aabeb27f152195.webp) “It’s known in the \[civilian world\] \[...\] that humans tend to trust the systems,” Mr. Gisel said. “That it’s more the case when the humans are tired, when the humans are under stress, when the humans have to deliver quickly, and that’s of course exactly the situation in which soldiers are in.” Many of the systems, he said, are built by technology companies “very far away from the battlefield,” and not all of them were designed for war. He drew two lines. One is any AI system that takes a person out of the kill chain. The other is weapons “where the target profile is the human being, as opposed to a tank, weapon systems, or another typical military objective,” a ban he said rests on “ethical concerns, humanitarian concerns, and a moral line.” Some U.S. warships already carry guns that track and destroy incoming threats on their own, but those aim at ships and missiles, not people. Unpredictable weapons should be an easy call, Mr. Gisel said, since soldiers are supposed to carry out what the commander wants. “If you have a weapon that is unpredictable in its effect, how can you deliver the commander’s intent?” Military planners, he expected, would agree. “But actually, that has also faced quite some pushback. Strangely enough,” he said. ![A military-gloved hand holds a marionette controller with dangling strings beside a drone, a red sun, and a bird-shaped shadow on textured ground.](https://rews.cc/img/94c63121ad3daf6ba9cd6ab1c766527455792900.webp) He said the chair’s last proposal in talks this summer called for autonomous weapons to be “reliable, explainable, understandable, and predictable,” and “all of that was taken out by some states.” A UN expert group on lethal autonomous weapons [adopted its final report by consensus](https://disarmament.unoda.org/en/updates/briefing-chair-ccw-gge-laws-margins-first-committee) on Sept. 4. [Human Rights Watch](https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/09/07/un-talks-on-killer-robots-ends-with-calls-for-negotiations-growing) said the text had been significantly watered down, and 404 Media reported that Russian and American diplomats stripped it of its force. Mr. Gisel also opposes AI in nuclear command and control. In 1983, Soviet early warning systems reported a U.S. missile launch, and Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov judged it a computer error and didn’t pass it up the chain. He was right. Satellites and their algorithms will stay, Mr. Gisel said, “but it’s so important to ensure that it remains entirely under human control and a really meaningful human control.” In August, António Guterres, the UN secretary general, and Mirjana Spoljaric, the ICRC president, [jointly urged states](https://www.icrc.org/en/statement/renewed-call-un-secretary-general-and-icrc-president-adopt-rules-autonomous-weapons) to adopt new rules. In [its Oct. 14 statement](https://www.icrc.org/en/statement/statement-un-general-assemblys-first-committee) to the committee, the ICRC said 47 states and the African Group backed opening negotiations. Governments will decide whether to start them at a review conference of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in Geneva, Nov. 16 to 20. “Otherwise, it’s the technology that will decide what is acceptable, and that’s not the world we want to live in, right?” Mr. Gisel said.