Phil
Pennington, Reporter
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon
is calling for new norms on how armies use artificial
intelligence, but also says rules are “giving way to
power”.
At the same time, a leader of efforts to rein
in military AI is accusing New Zealand of sitting on the
sidelines when it used to lead.
Drones have become the
biggest killer on Ukraine’s battlefields, an AI targeting
system is telling triggermen who
to hit in Gaza, and in the US, the Pentagon has
signalled its strongest embrace of generative AI
yet.
Luxon told India’s premier conference on
geopolitics and geoeconomics the world was on the cusp of an
AI transformation, but it could manage the risks.
“For
example, militaries are already using AI, which means the
international community is going to need to develop new
norms about how this is done in a way that ensures
compliance with the rules of war and ensures human
responsibility in conflict,” he
said at the Raisina Dialogue.
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But having just
called for protective norms around AI, Luxon then noted –
repeatedly – that the rules were being ripped up.
“We
are seeing rules giving way to power … rules are being
undermined, whether those around territorial integrity,
freedom of navigation, or laws of war … the geostrategic
picture I’ve painted is stark, rules are giving way to
power,” he said.
Years of international summits and
declarations to try to set AI norms have not
succeeded.
New Zealand’s former disarmament minister
Phil Twyford called the process “painfully slow”, while MFAT
on Wednesday said there had been “limited
progress”.
Oceania’s only commissioner on a new global
military AI forum, Australian Professor Toby Walsh, said the
convergence of tech advances with the erosion of rules posed
“a real risk of war becoming much more terrible”.
“In
Gaza and Israel …AI is being used to decide who lives and
who dies,” he said.
Walsh said he had spoken to New
Zealand diplomats, urging them to get the government to do
more.
“It’s surprising and disappointing” that it was
not, he added.
The government defended its record,
saying it was focused on efforts at the United
Nations.
The first UN experts meeting of 2025 on
killer robots early this month was still
debating how international laws might apply, and what
titles to put on five subject areas.
A key problem is
that any new rules that constrain how AI can enable armies,
might also constrain how AI for non-military advances,
especially in developing countries.
More UN meetings
on military AI are scheduled in September.
By
contrast, what the US Army now calls ‘HMI’ – human-machine
integration – is very directly accelerating.
Years
ago, a 2018 NZDF report on the future of warfare described
“battlefield targeting from satellites by artificial
intelligence for killer robots”, prompting the New
Zealand Herald to comment, “Some of it sounds like the
stuff of a sci-fi Hollywood blockbuster.”
Yet this is
exactly the technology the
NZDF is helping the US Army test in Project Convergence
this month.
Both politics and industry have increased
the acceleration in recent months.
“The interesting
development is not really what the Pentagon doing is, but
the fact that Silicon Valley and venture capital is
embracing this,” said Walsh, author of Machines Behaving
Badly.
The Pentagon’s new AI-embedding project,
Thunderforge, is a partnership not with huge defence
contractors like Boeing and Lockheed, but with young San
Francisco firm Scale AI, led by a chief executive in his
late 20s.
The Trump Administration had signalled “a
desire for nothing to hold them back”, Walsh said.
“It
does seem that there is a very large foot on the
accelerator.”
NZ appears to pull back
On the
flipside, New Zealand appeared to have pulled back from the
leadership it displayed for decades in getting rules on
weapons strengthened, whether over nuclear weapons or mines,
he said.
“My impression over the last decade of
participating in this forum and United Nations … is that
New Zealand is less and less engaged with this
problem.”
Walsh was appointed a commissioner after two
Netherlands-led summits on military AI – REAIM – in 2023 and
2024.
New Zealand sent just one person to the summits,
compared to Australia’s half a dozen.
This country did
not endorse either summit’s call or blueprint for action
even though its Five Eyes partners did; it did not have
anyone on the Global Commission on Responsible Military
Artificial Intelligence that Walsh is part of.
“It
was, you know, not a great ask to to sign up,” said
Walsh.
‘New Zealand’s voice is clear’ –
govt
The government pushed back, saying military AI
initiatives had multiplied, so it was concentrating on UN
efforts and a
US-led ‘Political Declaration on Responsible Military Use of
AI and Autonomy’.
“New Zealand’s voice is clear,”
said Associate Foreign Affairs Minister Todd McClay in a
statement.
New Zealand had signed the the Bletchley
Park AI safety summit declaration – though a year late in
2024 – and its successor summit, the Paris declaration, last
month, although the Paris meeting carefully skirted military
issues.
McClay has oversight because the coalition
government did not appoint a Disarmament Minister, the
second time a National-led government has downgraded the
portfolio since it was set up after the nuclear-free
legislation of the 80s.
An expert working group on
killer robots set up in 2022 had just a few meetings, before
MFAT pulled the plug last year.
Twyford, Labour’s
spokesperson on disarmament, said the government was not
doing enough to “push back” against the big powers, the US,
China, India and Russia that did “not want a bar” of
military AI rules.
“If we don’t, the consequences for
the species could be horrific.
“I’m just not seeing
evidence from the current government that they’re making
this a priority.”
Twyford in 2021 got Cabinet to
commit to supporting international rules. However, Cabinet
caveats then carved out room for the Defence Force to remain
interoperable with US and Australia’s advances in AI
technology.
Twyford and Walsh illustrate the splits
that drag back the efforts on new norms: Walsh said the UN
was ineffective, with any moves easily vetoed, but Twyford
said the UN was the key forum to launch AI debates, that
could lead to separate treaties that could not be vetoed, as
happened with anti-personnel landmines in the
1990s.
Balancing the benefits with the
risks
Luxon, at the Raisina Dialogue, mentioned the
risks but stressed the benefits of AI as a
whole.
“While we need to manage change, we cannot
allow ourselves to be paralysed by the risks,” Luxon
said.
“For those who believe they can outcompete
through this period of technological dislocation, the
opportunities are there. The citizens, the companies, and
the countries that embrace the coming change will be the
ones that reap the dividends.”
India hosts the next
international summit on AI later this year.
Delhi does
not support the negotiation of legally binding rules on
autonomous weapons systems, and abstained on a related vote
– draft resolution L77 – at the the UN last
October.
Its defence force has just launched 75
AI-related technologies, as well as the
Indrajaal autonomous drone security system that uses
SkyCop drones to protect the likes of cities and power
stations.
“Smartness” was as important for bombs as
their “size and explosive capacity”, its Defence Minister said
recently.