ROME – The Vatican is calling for an international ban on killer robots used in wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
The Vatican is backing new restrictions on the AI-driven “lethal autonomous weapons,” often known by the acronym “LAWs.”
Italian Archbishop Ettore Balestrero, the Vatican’s Permanent Observer to the United Nations in Geneva, argued for a moratorium on the development of weapons systems that can make firing decisions without human intervention — often dubbed “killer robots”.
“It is profoundly distressing,” Balestrero said in an address to experts, “that, adding to the suffering caused by armed conflicts, the battlefields are also becoming testing grounds for more and more sophisticated weapons.”
