Americans for Responsible Innovation

National Security & Strategic Competition

The Autonomous Weapons
Landscape

Dozens of lethal and kinetic autonomous weapon systems are fielded and deployed today, increasingly blurring the boundary between who or what makes life-and-death decisions.

— Systems fielded
— National operators

01 — The spectrum of human control

Autonomy Changes the Role of Human Judgment

Each system in this dataset can select a target or complete an engagement with some level of autonomy. What separates them is where in the kill chain human judgment is absent — and whether anyone retains a real opportunity to intervene.

Classification

02 — The systems

The Systems.

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03 — The landscape

Who builds them, and who uses them.

Origin and national operator counts diverge sharply — these systems export widely. The landscape view breaks the dataset down by country of origin, by national operator, by domain and by autonomy class, and lists the manufacturers behind each producing state.

Open the landscape