The UN's December 2024 LAWS resolution passed 166-3 but the US and Russia both rejected the November 2025 follow-up, ensuring autonomous weapons remain unregulated as AI-targeted drones deploy in Ukraine

The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems in December 2024 with 166 votes in favor and only 3 opposed (Belarus, North Korea, Russia), calling for a two-tiered approach to prohibit some and regulate others. But by November 2025, the US and Russia both rejected a follow-up resolution, and the Geneva-based Group of Governmental Experts operating under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons reached a familiar deadlock. Meanwhile, Russia's Lancet loitering munition -- a drone with AI-based autonomous targeting that independently identifies and crashes into targets -- has seen wide deployment in Ukraine, and waves of Shahed-136 drones programmed to autonomously navigate to and destroy civilian power infrastructure have been documented. Why it matters: Leading military powers refuse binding regulation while actively deploying AI-targeted weapons in combat, so the norm against autonomous killing is eroded through operational precedent rather than legal authorization, so other nations facing security threats adopt autonomous weapons without any international accountability framework, so civilian casualties from autonomous targeting errors have no clear chain of legal responsibility under international humanitarian law, so the window for preemptive regulation closes as more militaries integrate autonomy into their arsenals and develop institutional dependencies on the technology. The structural root cause is that the CCW's consensus-based decision-making gives any single major military power an effective veto over binding regulation, the US and Russia both view autonomous weapons as strategically essential and refuse to constrain their development, and unlike chemical or biological weapons which had decades of normative development before codification, autonomous weapons are being deployed faster than the diplomatic process can produce binding agreements.