The seventh review conference on certain conventional weapons opens in Geneva on 16-20 November with 128 countries attending, and the core question is binary: will states agree to a mandate for negotiating a legally binding instrument on autonomous weapons, or will the process be shunted back into years of non-binding discussion? A coalition of 50 states — including Ireland, Italy, Brazil, Mexico, France and Germany — has proposed a strict mandate: a time-limited expert group would negotiate draft rules over three sessions totalling 25 days in 2027, with a draft protocol submitted that same year. More than 70 states support beginning negotiations, and 163 voted at the UN disarmament committee that they were ready to launch. The numbers overwhelmingly favour action. The blocking coalition tells a different story about who actually holds power. Russia, the US and Israel are pushing against any timetable for a legally binding instrument. The US position favours leaving regulation to individual nation states under existing international humanitarian law, while the Pentagon has stood up its own autonomous weapons working group — a move that consolidates standard-setting inside the defence establishment rather than the multilateral system. The UK did not back the Irish-led statement and has separately argued that current humanitarian law is sufficient. These are the states with the most advanced autonomous weapons programmes, and they are the ones resisting binding constraints. The gap between discussion and deployment is already closed. In July, Ukraine reported that Russia used an AI-guided drone that struck a propane tank at a fuel station in Zaporizhzhia — the first confirmed use of an AI-guided autonomous strike in the Russia-Ukraine war. The US bombing of a school in Minab, Iran, on 28 February killed at least 175 people; targeting included input from the Maven AI system operated by Palantir, which reportedly did not flag that the site had been a school for 10 years, and no human reviewer caught the error either. These are not hypothetical scenarios. They are the current operating environment. Pope Leo XIV intervened ahead of the conference, stating that decisions relating to human life could never be given to machines and calling on states to take concrete steps toward banning lethal autonomous weapons. The ICRC and its president Mirjana Spoljaric, alongside outgoing UN secretary general António Guterres, warned in August that the world was 'nearing a moral red line where autonomous weapons could kill without human involvement.' Human Rights Watch and Stop Killer Robots argue that AI-assisted weapons behave unpredictably, increasing the risk of fatal errors and battlefields spinning out of human control. The structural dynamics here are familiar from every arms control negotiation: the states with the largest arsenals and most advanced programmes have the strongest incentive to delay binding rules, because delay preserves their freedom of action during the period of maximum technological advantage. Anna Hehir of the Future of Life Institute named the mechanism directly — proposals for more years of discussion on non-legally binding measures are smokescreens to keep autonomous weapons unregulated and states unaccountable. A poll commissioned by the same institute found overwhelming public support for a global treaty in France, Germany and the UK, alongside scepticism that any treaty would be respected. The expert working group defined autonomous weapons as those 'capable of identifying, selecting and engaging a target without the need to refer the issue to a human being.' The French government welcomed the group's proposals as sufficient basis for a mandate that 'bans completely autonomous weapons systems and regulates systems with autonomous functions.' But consensus-based multilateral processes give veto power to the states most invested in the status quo. Multilateral arms control agreements historically emerge only when cross-regional majorities withstand pressure and step outside consensus paralysis. Whether the 163 states ready to negotiate can hold that line against the armed few is the question Geneva will answer. The 20-year trajectory is stark. Without binding rules, autonomous weapons development follows the logic of an unregulated arms race where first-mover advantage compounds. Each year of delay makes the installed base of unregulated systems larger, the norm against their use weaker, and the eventual cost of governance higher. The Maven/Minab incident is the template: AI systems making targeting inputs, humans nominally in the loop but not catching errors, and no international legal framework assigning accountability when civilians die.
