Fifteen Hours, Cameras Off: How the US and Russia Gutted the UN's Killer-Robot Rules

In the early hours of September 5, a UN disarmament meeting in Geneva concluded three years of work on lethal autonomous weapons systems — the machines colloquially known as “killer robots.” A final report was adopted. A majority of states went home satisfied. And according to a Washington Post reconstruction published Saturday, the text that survived was substantially weaker than the one most delegations had spent three years building, because two delegations — the United States and Russia — spent roughly 15 hours of last-minute, closed-door editing making sure of it.

What emerged this week is the most detailed account yet of how the strongest effort to date at international rules for autonomous weapons was quietly hollowed out, and why the fate of those rules now hinges on a make-or-break session in November.

What was stripped out

The Geneva process ran under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), the same framework that governs blinding lasers and incendiary weapons. Its Group of Governmental Experts had a mandate to draft “elements of an instrument” on systems that can identify, select and engage targets without a human operator intervening in those functions. The document is non-binding — its importance lies in what it could authorize next: formal negotiations on prohibitions for systems deemed inherently unacceptable, and regulation of the rest.

Human Rights Watch, whose Sept. 7 analysis the Post’s reporting corroborates and extends, documented the casualties. The final version removes references to design and development — meaning the rules would touch only use, not how the weapons are built. It narrows the scope from all international law to international humanitarian law alone. It cuts language on ethical considerations, on predictability, on reliability, and on design standards. And per the Post, the two countries also removed a provision requiring human review of AI-generated targets before a strike — arguably the single most consequential safeguard in the entire text.

The mechanics were as striking as the substance. The edits were pushed through in a closed-door session with cameras off and observers removed. The American and Russian delegations fielded legal teams nearly twice the size of other delegations’, grinding through the text until the early hours. Under the CCW’s consensus rule, two major military powers can block even a non-binding preliminary step — a structural veto that turned the endgame into a war of attrition the smaller delegations were never equipped to win.

The strongest momentum yet — for a weaker text

The irony is that the political wind has never been more favorable. A record 76 nations now support moving to negotiations on legally binding rules; 70 of them are CCW High Contracting Parties, an outright majority of the Convention. Reuters reported that the Sept. 5 agreement — non-binding as it is — marks the most significant step after more than a decade of talks. Ukraine’s battlefield innovations, Sudan, and other live conflicts have turned “meaningful human control” from an activist slogan into an urgent operational question: Ukraine’s own drone programs, built under constant electronic warfare, are themselves an argument for terminal autonomy that no treaty has yet answered.

The final report retains some positive elements: a characterization of what lethal autonomous weapons are, an affirmation that human control and judgment are required for compliance with international law, and restrictions on systems that cannot comply with that law. Advocates say that’s a sufficient foundation for launching negotiations. But a foundation for rules on use, with no say over design, no predictability or reliability standards, and no human-review requirement before a machine-chosen target is struck, is a much narrower foundation than the one 76 countries thought they were building.

Why Washington did it

The US position is not new. Washington has long favored an approach rooted in existing international humanitarian law, national weapons reviews, and “responsible use” declarations — preserving room to develop military capability — over new binding prohibitions. Russia has repeatedly resisted any binding instrument outright and can use the consensus procedure to delete language it finds restrictive. Their interests diverge; their edit buttons did not.

The Geneva outcome also mirrors an unresolved fight at home. President Trump signed a June memorandum ordering the Pentagon to update Directive 3000.09 — the policy requiring human judgment before autonomous weapons fire — within 90 days. As of Saturday, that revision is overdue and unpublished. Meanwhile Trump told the General Assembly that the United States rejects any “globalist scheme” to control what he now officially calls “Super Intelligence,” even as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei was warning the Security Council that unchecked systems “could be a risk to humanity as a whole” and Sam Altman urged governments to make decisions “accountable to the people they serve.”

Nicole van Rooijen, executive director of Stop Killer Robots, accused Washington and Moscow of deliberately weakening the text. Richard Lennane, a disarmament adviser for the International Committee of the Red Cross, offers the counterpoint worth holding onto: such treaties function less as punishment than as norm-setting — the way past agreements limited land mines and cluster munitions even for non-parties. A weak text still names a problem the world can rally around.

November is the verdict

Diplomats return to Geneva in November for the CCW’s Seventh Review Conference to decide whether to launch formal treaty negotiations. The record 76-nation bloc will push for a mandate; the consensus rule gives the two states that gutted the text an effective veto over that path. If it fails, the fallback routes are a General Assembly process or a treaty among willing states outside the CCW — faster, but omitting the very actors most capable of shaping military autonomy.

Three years of expert work produced a text that no longer says what most of its authors intended. The question November must answer is whether 76 countries will accept a watered-down foundation — or walk out of the consensus room and build their own.