Letter follows VP Vance call for human control over life-and-death decisions
Ahead of Thursday’s House Armed Services Committee markup of the FY27 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a coalition of national security and AI leaders sent a letter to congressional leaders echoing calls by Vice President J.D. Vance for greater restrictions on the use of AI in autonomous weapons. Letter signers, including Brad Carson, President of Americans for Responsible Innovation and former General Counsel to the Army, Brendan Steinhauser, CEO of the Alliance for Secure AI, and Mark Beall, President of The AI Policy Network and former Pentagon AI Policy Director, urged the Armed Services committees to include safeguards in the NDAA for AI-enabled lethal autonomous weapons systems.
The letter calls on Congress to ensure that humans retain final decision-making authority over the use of lethal force as the U.S. military expands its use of AI. The coalition effort follows remarks by Vice President Vance last week declaring that, in the modern AI era, decisions over life and death must be made by humans, not machines.
“Congress should require meaningful human oversight over any AI-enabled system involved in the use of lethal force,” Carson, Steinhauser, and Beall said in the letter. “At a minimum, a human operator must make the decision to approve and engage a target, with enough time and information to exercise genuine judgment. No system should make that decision on its own, and no human operator should be reduced to rubber-stamping a machine’s recommendations.
As bipartisan consensus grows around the need for the federal government to adopt safeguards and modernize in the AI era, ARI last month cautioned lawmakers that the current House NDAA draft does not yet meet the scale of the technological transformation reshaping modern warfare and national security.
In a national poll released earlier this year, ARI found overwhelming concerns among American voters about the use of AI for autonomous weapons without human oversight. A full 75 percent of Americans agree that decisions about using lethal force in war should involve meaningful human judgment rather than being left entirely to AI systems.
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Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to policy advocacy in the public interest, focused on emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). Learn more at ARI.us.