AI warfare and power: Who gets to automate violence?

AI is reshaping how violence is executed and justified. Professor Zoë Marriage interrogates the shifting dynamics of warfare and asks key questions about who holds power and accountability for automated violence.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping how wars are fought - accelerating violence, consolidating power, and automating inequality on a global scale.

The question is no longer whether AI will transform warfare. It already has. The real questions are: who controls it, and who bears the consequences?

Beyond the arms race narrative 

Much of the public discussion frames AI militarisation as a West vs East arms race between the US, Israel, China and Russia, as these states invest heavily in autonomous systems, AI-assisted targeting and military analytics. But this framing focuses on competition between powerful nations, rather than the power structures of global hierarchies it embeds – or who it impacts.

Automated targeting systems and AI-assisted surveillance are refined under live conditions.

While AI technologies are designed, organised and owned by people and companies in rich nations, they are deployed, tested, and normalised in the Global South. Automated targeting systems and AI-assisted surveillance are refined under live conditions - as we’ve seen in Iran, Palestine, Pakistan and Yemen.  

Structural inequalities at scale 

And at speed. In war, speed is a strategic advantage and AI delivers that. The military-industrial complex is overlaying inequalities while becoming more intrusive, fine-grained, extensive, and polarising.

Errors persist and in contexts of structural inequality, those disproportionately affect populations with the least political leverage.  

This infrastructure is dependent on historical data, embedded assumptions and probabilistic outcomes. Errors persist and in contexts of structural inequality, those disproportionately affect populations with the least political leverage.

When 'errors' mean civilian lives 

And by errors, what we often mean is civilian casualties and the destruction of infrastructure. So, who is held accountable when attacks, including war crimes, are committed by lethal partially, or potentially fully, autonomous weapons?

AI warfare may be changing the speed and nature of violence, but – occasional reversals notwithstanding – the hierarchies of power remain, with a real human toll.

Header image credit: Ahmed Akacha via Unsplash.