The UN and Red Cross Are Calling for Restrictions on AI Drones and Killer Robots

In a world where autonomous weapons can choose targets on their own, data can put us all at risk, a US veteran warns.

By Mike Ludwig , 

Truthout

August 27, 2026

A Titan Strike unmanned ground vehicle, equipped with a .50 Caliber machine gun, moves and secures ground on Salisbury Plain during exercise Autonomous Warrior 18.Ben Birchall / PA Images via Getty Images

The United Nations and the Red Cross are warning that rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic weapons are bringing the world dangerously close to crossing a moral red line that has inspired dystopian science fiction for decades: the autonomous targeting of humans by deadly machines.

In an appeal to world leaders on August 25, the International Committee of the Red Cross and UN Secretary-General António Guterres renewed their call for a global treaty establishing restrictions on autonomous weapons systems. They warned that the technology behind AI targeting software and unpiloted drones has developed at record speed since the UN and Red Cross first called for such negotiations three years ago.

“At the same time, scientists and engineers developing these systems have themselves raised the alarm,” Guterres and the Red Cross said in a joint statement on August 25. “When the architects of this technology are calling for limits, States cannot afford to remain passive. This year must mark a turning point.”

In other words, the world must act now to rein in what are commonly known as “killer robots” or “slaughterbots” — unpiloted drones, robotic dogs, robot sentries armed with guns, AI targeting systems, and other digitally driven death machines that can identify, strike, and eliminate human beings on their own.

“You don’t even need drone operators; you can just type in a coordinate and not see the implications of what you are doing,” said Rory Fanning, an author, activist, and veteran of the U.S. war on Afghanistan, in an interview.

The world must act now to rein in what are commonly known as “killer robots” — unpiloted drones and other digitally driven death machines that can strike human beings on their own.

Killer robots no longer exist in the realm of science fiction. Autonomous weapons are increasingly being deployed on the battlefield, including in the wars funded and waged by the U.S. in Ukraine and Iran, respectively. While the U.S. and other militaries have flown drones with remote human pilots for years, AI targeting systems are being integrated into drones that can identify, track, and eliminate targets on their own.

“The same technology that brings you an Uber kills somebody in Palestine, and people really need know that and consider that,” Lisa Ling, a U.S. veteran who worked at the Pentagon’s drone program prior to 2012, told Truthout.

In Palestine, autonomous weapon systems are targeting and brutally killing people in Gaza and the West Bank as part of ethnic cleansing campaigns sanctioned by Israel’s far right government. U.S.-based companies such as Microsoft and Palantir face backlash for selling AI targeting platforms to the Israeli military, which has attacked and killed aid workers, journalists, first responders, and health care workers. The UN estimates that 30 percent of the people killed in what is broadly viewed as a genocide in Gaza are children.

Israel’s use of AI tools has contributed to digital dehumanization, the process of reducing human beings to data points used to make decisions that negatively impact their lives, according to the Stop Killer Robots campaign. Like the data sold by brokers to target consumers with specific ads online, the data used for targeting Palestinians is gathered from cellphones and social media, for example.

As Ling points out, a corporate spinoff of iRobot, the company that makes the popular Roomba robot vacuum, became a contractor developing autonomous weapons for the U.S. military in 2016. The spinoff was acquired by Arlington Capital Partners in 2016 for $45 million, but Ling said we should be alarmed that technology in consumer products and autonomous weapons comes from similar sources.


“The same technology that brings you an Uber kills somebody in Palestine, and people really need know that and consider that.”

“Basically, the same company that [made] your Roomba is now a military contractor,” Ling said. “As a technician who worked inside the drone program, I would ask people to look at where the data that is being used for targeting is coming from.”

Matt Howard, the interim organizing director at About Face, an antiwar group for veterans, said Ling and other whistleblowers who previously worked with killer drones for the U.S. military have brought attention to the unique toll that working with such weapons takes on military personnel.

“There’s been a deep cost for people involved in those programs, both in terms of moral injury and trauma,” Howard told Truthout. “AI-driven, cloud-based warfare is this next phase we’re entering, and that has a ton of pretty scary implications.”

There is also a moral cost to the U.S. as a nation of voters. Howard pointed to a 2013 drone strike on a civilian wedding procession in Yemen that killed at least a dozen civilians, and the warrantless execution of a U.S. citizen by a drone strike in Yemen in 2011, as examples of attacks that desensitized the U.S. public to autonomous warfare under President Barack Obama — but had deep and lasting impacts on veterans.

“Americans end up caring less about the legal and moral implications once there isn’t a human being pressing the trigger, or in the cockpit, and it’s not so close to home,” Howard told Truthout. “Our leaders understand how this works and they exploit it — drone and AI-influenced warfare has involved the U.S. more deeply in extralegal warfare with disastrous consequences for civilians in Iran and too many other countries to list.”

On February 26, 2026, the first day of President Donald Trump’s war on Iran, a U.S.-guided Tomahawk missile struck a school for girls near a military facility in Minab, killing at least 156 civilians, including 120 schoolchildren. While Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have refused to admit U.S. responsibility, Democrats in Congress are investigating whether targeting AI software built by Palantir with Anthropic’s AI was used in what appears to be a horrific targeting mix-up based on outdated data.


Autonomous weapons remove humans from the decision-making process, leaving algorithms to make life-or-death choices that could cause future conflicts to spiral out of control.

While the U.S. was the first nation to deploy killer drones, the technology has become a sort of equalizer for smaller nations facing off against major militaries. Ukraine’s military became a world leader in drone innovation by fighting Russian invaders. In the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, Tehran has strategically deployed cheap drones to attack U.S. bases, deplete stockpiles of expensive U.S. interceptor missiles, and blockade oil shipments in the Strait of Hormuz, leaving Trump and Hegseth looking weak on the global stage.

Howard of About Face told Truthout that autonomous weapons remove humans from the decision-making process, leaving algorithms to make life-or-death choices that could cause future conflicts to spiral out of control. Some analysts fear the destructive potential of AI is on par with nuclear weapons, Howard said, and policy makers must learn lessons from the Cold War, when humanity faced the collective prospect of nuclear annihilation.

“You need people to be able to make the decision not to do a thing,” Howard said. “There are plenty of examples throughout history, including during the Cold War, when a human being decided maybe we are not going to push that button right now … and avoided full-on nuclear warfare.”

In their appeal to world leaders on August 25, the Red Cross and Guterres at the UN said nations must move beyond “incremental discussions” around autonomous weapons and take decisive action now toward global regulations or a treaty restricting their use. Nation-states have a responsibility both to the people suffering under current conflicts and future generations, they said, and negotiations must begin now:


A failure to act quickly and decisively will cost lives. It will leave future generations to inherit a world in which the absence of clear and specific prohibitions and restrictions on these weapons opens the door to practices that would erode the protections international humanitarian law is meant to guarantee … Future generations will ask whether leaders acted when there was still a chance to set limits before these weapons proliferated beyond control.

While it may be a political long shot in an age of rising authoritarianism and AI oligarchs, Fanning said we should demand our leaders establish a global ban on autonomous weapon systems not only to save lives, but also to preserve our humanity for future generations.

“Killing another human being is the most unnatural thing in the world to do, and the only way it can be done is creating distance between the person who is killing and the person who is dying,” Fanning said.

Faith Leaders Collectively Raise Alarm as AI and Nuclear Weapons Systems Merge

As AI complicates nuclear threats, religious groups are doubling down on calls for disarmament.

By Jon Letman ,

Truthout

August 5, 2026

Pope Leo XIV ordains a group of 10 priests at Mass in St. Peter's Basilica as the Church celebrated the World Day of Prayer for Vocations on April 26, 2026, in Vatican City. As he prayed the Regina Caeli in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Leo XIV called for the responsible use of nuclear energy. His appeal came on the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which he said “marked the conscience of humanity.”Mario Tomassetti - Vatican Media via Vatican Pool / Getty Images

Eighty-one years after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear landscape is dire. Experts say arms control is on “life support,” if not dead, while diplomacy and negotiations are overrun by conflict and confrontation. In February, the expiration of the New START Treaty marked the end of more than five decades of U.S.-Russian (Soviet) arms-control treaties.

Spending on nuclear weapons continues to rise sharply, growing by nearly 20 percent last year as nuclear arsenals are modernized and expanded. In May, for the third time in 16 years, negotiations over the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) failed to reach a consensus document, with one of the three central objectives of the treaty — nuclear disarmament — a distant and elusive dream.

In January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the symbolic Doomsday Clock, which assesses the risk of global catastrophe, to 85 seconds to midnight, the highest level of risk in its 79-year history. As the nine nuclear-armed states and their allies continue to rely on nuclear deterrence and the threat of mutual nuclear annihilation, a 2025 YouGov public opinion poll reported 69 percent of U.S. respondents said nuclear weapons make the world a more dangerous place.

Politicians and policy makers from nuclear-armed nations and their allies continuously fail to pursue nuclear diplomacy and arms control, but religious leaders and faith groups are increasingly calling for nuclear risk reduction and disarmament, and warning against the rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into nuclear weapon systems.


The US-Israeli War on Iran Is Incentivizing Nuclear Proliferation
As nuclear-armed countries violate international law, others may turn to proliferation as a form of deterrence.  By Jon Letman , Truthout March 26, 2026


Faith in Disarmament

Opposition to nuclear weapons by religious leaders is almost as old as the bomb itself. In 1945, two weeks after the U.S. killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a group of dozens of religious and educational leaders published a statement calling the atomic bomb “an atrocity of a new magnitude” and offered its “unmitigated condemnation.”

In a 1955 Christmas radio message Pope Pius XII renounced nuclear weapons, a position which has strengthened in the papacy over time. In 2017, Pope Francis marked a significant change with his firm condemnation of the “very possession” of nuclear weapons. That same year, the Holy See was among the first to adopt and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) which is now supported by a majority of nations.

One Catholic leader actively working to reduce nuclear risk is Archbishop John Wester of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, a jurisdiction which includes the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, a group advocating for nuclear justice and restitution, and other communities affected by nuclear contamination.

“Over the years, we’ve had many people in my archdiocese who’ve suffered the maleffects of radiation poisoning,” Wester told Truthout. “We’ve certainly had a great preponderance of injury by nuclear weapon development.” Impacts of nuclear weapons include elevated rates of cancers and other illnesses as well as economic, social, and environmental harm.

While the Catholic church shifted its position from accepting nuclear deterrence to calling for disarmament more than a decade ago, much work remains to change attitudes and influence policies, said Wester. “The truth has a lot of competition with the deterrence narrative for 80 years, plus and the truth has competition with the great sums of money that are involved in nuclear weapon development into the trillions of dollars.”

Wester’s archdiocese is located at the heart of the U.S. nuclear enterprise, including many of his own parishioners who are employees at Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center, and Kirtland Underground Munitions and Maintenance Storage Complex, which houses the largest number of nuclear weapons (many of them retired) in a single U.S. site.

Wester said it’s more important than ever to counter the lack of public understanding and engagement around the issue of nuclear threats. “The public’s been duped by our leaders for the last 80 years … into thinking: ‘You’re perfectly safe because we’ve got all these thousands of nuclear warheads on trigger alert.’”

For those who think disarmament is naïve, he asks, “What’s more naïve, to think that our luck’s going to hold out, that we can live with nuclear weapons or … thinking, ‘no, we’ve got to get rid of them?’”

In an era when people face so many competing crises, many may feel they don’t have the capacity to take on one more issue, but Wester urges his peers not to turn away. “This is a universal urgent matter that all of us have, so won’t you at least spend some time and some effort in educating your parishioners about [nuclear issues] and talking to your elected officials?”

Even as Pope Leo makes powerful statements calling for nuclear disarmament, Wester wants to see more interfaith dialogue. “It’s something that we don’t think much about and frankly it’s something that our government would rather we don’t think about,” he said.

He said his role as a pastor is to ring the alarm bell and say, “We need to start looking at this and if we don’t, we refuse to do so at our own peril.” Wester encourages people to educate themselves on the merits of nuclear deterrence over nuclear disarmament.

Speaking to Truthout on July 16, the 81st anniversary of the first atomic explosion at the Trinity test site in the New Mexico desert, near his own archdiocese, Wester said, “These anniversaries serve a purpose.” August 9, the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, will be on a Sunday. Wester calls for people of faith “to pray about this, to preach on it, it’s a perfect time to do it.”


Filling the Leadership Vacuum

Also on July 16, half a world away from New Mexico, religious leaders, Nobel laureates, nuclear weapons policy and disarmament experts, and key individuals from the technology and AI sector gathered at the Vatican for three days of conversations, consultations, and presentations on artificial intelligence and nuclear war. The assembly concluded with the presentation of the Rome Declaration, a document calling for greater oversight and governance of AI as it pertains to nuclear and conventional weapons systems.

“AI built into nuclear systems leaves little time for, or even replaces, human judgement in a crisis,” the document reads. “This technology changes the context in which nuclear-armed states compete with each other.” It also states: “In the midst of a worsening nuclear arms race, we are embarking on an equally dangerous AI race.”

The Global Nobel Laureates Assembly on Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear War came on the heels of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence which warns against the integration of AI into weapons systems and calls for the safeguarding of “humanity, promotion of truth, dignity of work, social justice, and peace.”

The declaration also called for “urgent, sustained, and good-faith negotiations leading … to the verifiable and irreversible elimination of nuclear weapons.”

Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, was a presenter at the Vatican assembly. In an interview, he told Truthout that the declaration is a “warning and a call to action.”

“We’re reaching a tipping point with artificial intelligence as it enters into military affairs and military systems, particularly nuclear weapons command, control, and operations that create new dangers that already exist with respect to nuclear weapons and the theory of deterrence and how it is practiced and how human decisions are made in a crisis,” Kimball said. “[AI] will complicate that already dangerous equation.”

How much sway will these warnings have on men like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping? For heads of state who worship raw power and force, what are the words of a pope? This spring, Trump, who himself threatened Iran saying “a whole civilization will die tonight,” later falsely accused Pope Leo of supporting a nuclear-armed Iran.

In May, just before the NPT Review Conference, representatives from more than 100 faith organizations signed a joint interfaith statement calling for the creation of “a world free from nuclear weapons.” Signatories said that the NPT’s obligation to negotiate disarmament “has been deferred, diluted, and in many cases openly dismissed.”

Taking Enlightened Action

Soka Gakkai International (SGI), a prominent global Buddhist movement seeking the abolition of nuclear weapons, has focused on education and raising awareness about the dangers of nuclear war since the 1950s.

Anna Ikeda, SGI’s representative to the UN for disarmament, told Truthout that as a Buddhist movement, a core belief is that each person possesses “Buddhahood,” or enlightened nature, and is dignified and worthy of respect. Nuclear weapons, which she described as “the manifestation of our darkest tendencies,” impact the dignity of human life, human rights, and our ability to thrive as human beings, and they are diametrically opposed to what SGI values and believes.

Ikeda said that SGI wants to counter the myth that nuclear weapons are completely irrelevant to the lives of ordinary people. Discussion of these issues, she said, must not be limited to technical experts and policy wonks. “There’s this sort of disempowerment and we want to tackle that by educating people, informing them that this is an ongoing threat,” Ikeda said.

She acknowledges it is discouraging when political leaders aren’t listening, people don’t seem to care, and change happens faster than can reasonably be followed. But rather than give up, Ikeda said her faith tells her there is no other option than confront the threat. “My faith tells me that we must [act] … So in that sense, faith is so important to me. It fuels my action and hope.” She wants to believe that when there is a critical mass of people who care, government leaders have to pay attention.

An important challenge to the nuclear disarmament community is to increase engagement with people outside that bubble, said Ikeda. Faith groups can play a positive role by connecting the dots between nuclear weapons, human rights, social justice, and climate change.

Ikeda said there is an urgent need for more public engagement, harkening back to the grassroots movement of the 1980s, when global mass gatherings, protests, and an organized nuclear freeze movement proved effective in pressuring leaders who eventually slashed the number of nuclear warheads. In 1982, an estimated 1 million people marched from Central Park to the United Nations headquarters to demand nuclear disarmament. Today, collaboration between faith organizations can again motivate others to call for disarmament, Ikeda said.

SGI, along with the World Council of Churches, Pax Christi International, and other human rights and religious groups, are taking action to counter automated weapon systems through the Stop Killer Robots campaign. They are advocating at the UN and at regional levels against the integration of AI in targeting and other aspects of weapons.

“When we started to learn more about the advances in AI in the military domain, and the application in weapons, we really felt like it was the moment that we have to take a stance because it really defines who we are as human beings,” Ikeda said. “Do we let this technology get a hold of our capacity to destroy to a degree that we cannot even control?”

Facing the expansion of AI in weapons systems, including nuclear arsenals, Ikeda asks: “Is it really true that our ability to basically automate killing based on this algorithm and data how we create peace, or is there a better way?”


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Jon Letman

Jon Letman is a freelance journalist on Kauai. He writes about nuclear weapons, militarism, human rights and the environment in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. Follow him on Bluesky.

SGI Buddhists call for early regulation of Autonomous Weapons Systems

SGI Office for UN Affairs

The launch of the Stop Killer Robots-produced film Immoral Code held at London’s Prince Charles Cinema in May 2022. SGI and other groups supported the launch.

RNS Press Release Distribution Service

July 23, 2026 

On July 23, 2026, the SGI (Soka Gakkai International) issued a statement titled “Autonomous Weapons Systems: Ensuring Human Control Based on Respect for the Dignity of Life.” See full text in Japanese.

With ongoing conflicts serving as a catalyst for the rapid development and deployment of weapons incorporating emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), the SGI welcomes steps in the international community toward regulation of Autonomous Weapons Systems (AWS). The SGI statement calls for comprehensive prohibition of systems designed to select and engage human targets.

It asserts: “If attacks involving civilians were to become semi-automated in conflicts through the unchecked use of AWS, the restraining force of human conscience—which has long served as a foundation supporting international law—would be entirely lost.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has also proposed that the regulatory instrument under discussion by the Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) convened under the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) include a provision prohibiting antipersonnel AWS. The Stop Killer Robots coalition, in which the SGI has participated since 2018, likewise calls on governments to draw up legal and ethical boundaries to prevent a dangerous drift toward automated killing.

Chief Executive Director of the SGI Peace Center Hirotsugu Terasaki comments: “While we continue to work toward a world free from both nuclear weapons and autonomous killing machines, we welcome the focus in the ongoing negotiations on ensuring ‘meaningful human control’ over autonomous weapons. There is a growing understanding that decisions concerning life and death must never be left solely to machines.”

The SGI has consistently warned—based on the Buddhist principle of respect for the dignity of life—that AWS reduce those subjected to attack to mere “data.” Such a digital erasure of humanity risks trivializing the taking of life and the immense suffering inherent in war. The SGI has also highlighted the risk that AI algorithms may not only reflect but amplify existing social biases. Profiling systems could result in individuals being targeted by AWS on the basis of arbitrary assumptions about particular groups.

SGI President Daisaku Ikeda (1928–2023) first called for regulation at a time when autonomous weapons were still an imagined threat, warning in 2014: “Robotic weapons, when given a command to attack, automatically go on killing, without the intervention of human will . . . with no possibility of pangs of conscience or remorse. They present an extremely grave threat, particularly from a humanitarian perspective.”

By the March 2026 GGE session, 70 states had supported launching negotiations on a legally binding instrument. The final session is from August 31 to September 4, 2026, and the SGI hopes that the GGE’s report to the November Review Conference of the CCW will set out a way to launch negotiations on a treaty that incorporates a ban on antipersonnel AWS.

The SGI is determined to work together with the states calling for the regulation and prohibition of AWS, as well as with the ICRC and the civil society organizations and religious leaders participating in the Stop Killer Robots coalition. The SGI will continue to promote grassroots awareness of the dangers posed by autonomous weapons, including through promotion of documentaries such as Immoral Code.

The SGI (Soka Gakkai International) is an international association of the Soka Gakkai, a global community-based Buddhist organization that promotes peace, culture and education centered on respect for the dignity of life. This is the third statement by the SGI Global Perspectives Committee that issues statements suggesting approaches for the resolution of pressing global challenges, building upon ideas advocated by SGI President Daisaku Ikeda in his peace proposals.

###

Contact:
Hiro Sakurai
SGI Office for UN Affairs
hiro.sakurai@sgi-ouna.org

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of RNS or Religion News Foundation.

Recalling the Most Fateful Day in Human Existence

Patrick Mazza

 July 17, 2026

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The Ivy Mike test of the first hydrogen bomb took place Nov. 1, 1952 in the South Pacific. Far more devastating than the atomic bombs that preceded it, the race to the hydrogen bomb was triggered by another event that took place this day 81 years ago, July 16, 1945, when the first atomic weapon was tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico. That set off a logic of power that would place humanity’s future at risk, a danger only increasing in our world today.

The threshold crossed at Alamogordo

Today is the 81^st anniversary of the most fateful day in the 300,000 years of our human species existence. We have always fought each other. On July 16, 1945, the prospect we could fight ourselves nearly to extinction came into view.

On that date, the first atomic weapon was exploded at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The culmination of the Manhattan Project, the Trinity test opened the nuclear age that was to be announced to the world 3 weeks later with the detonation over Hiroshima. I have said it before. I’ll say it again. This is the day the world should have changed, when humanity crossed a threshold to an entirely new situation. For the first time, we could wipe ourselves out, or nearly.

Instead the world moved on to build mass numbers of nuclear weapons, first atomic, then thermonuclear, made possible by implosion of hydrogen with atomic weapons. We have learned since that even 100 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs can cause a nuclear winter collapsing agricultural production and killing billions. A full-scale nuclear war might cause a winter leaving few alive.

This day, July 16, 2026, it seems that not only has humanity not learned the lesson – It is plunging further into danger. This Trinity anniversary is the first in 55 years there is no agreement among nuclear powers to limit the numbers of weapons. In February, the NewSTART Treaty between the U.S. and Russia expired. So a condition that lasted for around two-thirds of the nuclear age is now defunct. Today the U.S. and Russia each keep around 1,800 nuclear warheads on alert to be delivered by submarines, missiles and bombers. With the end of NewSTART they are free to bring weapons out of storage. The U.S. has 3,700, Russia 4,400. Spaces in missile tubes and bomb bays can be readily filled.

Meanwhile, China is moving from keeping its estimated 620 nuclear weapons on reserve to full alert, the same dangerous launch-on-warning protocol followed by the U.S. and Russia. At the same time, it is building up active warhead numbers to roughly the level of the other two powers.

Nuclear dangers are increasing even as wars in West Asia and Europe are escalating. These seemingly irreconcilable conflicts have no clear end, and the possibility of crossing nuclear threholds is being raised in both by serious observers. Of course, the nuclear issue is at the center of the conflict in West Asia. Israel and the U.S. claim that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons, using that as a justification for their preemptive war. Iran has been well capable of developing nuclear weapons for decades, but has repeatedly said it is not seeking them on religious grounds. If anything, the war has given the Iranians incentives to finally acquire them, while weakening leadership forces that stood against this. Israel itself has its own arsenal estimated at anywhere from 90 to 400 weapons, and has not hesitated to threaten use. Some sources indicate it used this threat to strongarm the U.S. into attacking Iran, otherwise it would do so itself.

Short-term gain vs. long-term survival

At one level, it all seems deeply irrational. It is hard to see continuation of current trends without some catastrophic blow-up. This gets to the fundamental issue, why humanity did not learn when we unlocked the secrets of nuclear power 81 years ago, why we continue on a path with good odds to produce disaster. It is the contradiction between short-term pursuit of power and long-term survival. The incentives and drives that motivate the political and economic systems of the world are conditioned on that short-term drive. If one side doesn’t pursue powers that may be available, even with potentially devastating consequences, the other side will. That is why both the U.S. and Soviet Union raced to develop hydrogen bombs in the 1950s knowing how much more destructive they are.

In a parallel way, it is why AI researchers concerned it could wipe out humanity nonetheless have the gas pedal all the way to the floor. The first to create AI superintelligence will dominate, so it must be us, goes the thinking. If it decides humanity is a bad idea, that is a risk we must take, the developers believe. This is even as the wars are illuminating another arms race, that of drone warfare. AI is being brought to bear, so the automated killer robots of the Terminator movies are becoming reality.

The world picture presents yet another irrationality created by a similar logic. Consider that the conflict between the U.S. and Iran now centers on control of the Straits of Hormuz. This is the chokepoint through which around 25% of the world’s seaborne oil and 20% of its liquid natural gas flow. Control represents a global superpower which the U.S. can ill afford to lose to Iran. Yet it has already lost it. That is part of the irreconcilable nature of this conflict with incredibly dangerous implications.

In the same world picture, Northwest Europe is suffering an unprecedented and deadly heatwave. Fires are breaking out in France and Britain. Heat domes are popping up in North America and around the world. An El Nino warming event is mounting in the Pacific Ocean, feeding global heat and transmitting impacts to all corners of the planet. Crucially that includes food production. Wildfires burning in Canada are sending smoke plumes choking the northeastern U.S.

This is all happening while the ship of fools known as the Trump Administration is doing all it can to dismantle climate science and clean energy development. It is actively pursuing a policy it openly describes as energy dominance. The U.S. is now by far the world’s biggest oil and gas producer, and the administration seeks to leverage that keep the U.S. as global #1. The actions against Venezuela and war on Iran are key elements of that strategy.

It would be hard to find a more pronounced case of short-term power seeking over long-term survival. Control of energy resources is indeed one of the keystones of power over people and nations. The short-term logic is clear. The long-term reality is calamitous. Humanity gained tremendous evolutionary advantage when it mastered the use of fire. Now we may be consumed in our own, whether the rapid conflagration of nuclear war or the slower but still deadly rise of heat caused by fossil fuel burning.

Yet that short-term pursuit of power continues because that is the logic of the political and economic systems that rule the world, and the logic that people who rise in those systems must follow to rise. It is a self-feeding cycle that must be broken. It’s going to take more than a peace movement, or a climate movement. It is going to take a movement that questions the very assumptions of power driving the system.

What is power for?

Power is an element of everything in life. We must ask what power is for. What does it serve? I believe the fundamental flaw in prevailing systems is the pursuit of power as its own end, whether dominance by nations and states, or bottom-line profit by corporations. Power must be constrained within the context of broader goals, none more central than long-term survival. That involves a vision for the whole beyond the interests of any one group, nation or organization. It may in the end involve something as basic as infusing the golden rule into all institutions. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. All the world’s great religions have some version of this.

Today, I fear we are sleepwalking toward catastrophe, driven by leaders of the baby boom and younger generations who have forgotten the horrors of the last global war, which ended in 1945. Driven as well by ignorance of the long-term consequences of fossil fuel combustion, often deliberately by those who have interests in its continuation. I wonder what it will be to wake us up. Mushroom clouds rising somewhere on Earth? A climate mass casualty event that cannot be denied?

I hope we get it soon. Cause the world is becoming more dangerous, and we clearly have not learned the lesson that we should have this day 81 years ago.

This first appeared on Patrick Mazza’s Substack page, The Raven.

Amid Fears of Killer Robots, Humanoid MMA Fight in China Ends With Decapitation

“One brutal kick sent the robot’s head hanging loose.”

Two humanoid robots fight at the Ultimate Robot Knock-out Legend competition in Shenzhen, China on July 17, 2026.
(Photo by Shenzhen Story/YouTube/screenshot)

Jessica Corbett
Jul 17, 2026

COMMON DREAMS

Amid warnings from experts and political leaders about “killer robots,” a Chinese robotics company on Thursday hosted an unprecedented combat tournament in which one humanoid robot decapitated another.

The fight featuring the decapitation—footage of which quickly circulated online—was part of the opening night of the Ultimate Robot Knock-out Legend (URKL) competition in Shenzhen, organized by the company EngineAI, which developed the humanoid.

The Chinese Embassy in Ireland was among the accounts on the social media platform X that highlighted the moment when one robot’s “head” was dislodged.




The “white humanoid robot, named ‘White Eagle’ landed a high kick to the head of its black opponent, ‘Matador,’ which made the robot’s head rock precariously in its socket before rolling completely out of place,” according to Newsweek. “The two continued to spar as Matador’s head was swinging from its socket until eventually the robot fell, crushing its head underneath its body.”

Unveiled last year, the humanoid is called T800, a nod to the Terminator franchise. EngineAI’s website features videos of T800 executing various mixed martial arts (MMA) moves, from a combination punch and a roundhouse kick to punch-kick combos.

EngineAI announced UKRL, the “world’s first” humanoid robot combat league, early this year, seeking 32 teams from universities, enterprises, and research institutions worldwide to compete using its robots. The first round of competition is scheduled for July-August, followed by another round in September-October, and the grand finals in November-December.

As the Chinese tabloid Global Times reported when the tournament was announced in February:
Pan Helin, a Beijing-based veteran analyst, told the Global Times on Monday that such competitions help enhance public awareness of humanoid robots and expand potential application scenarios.

Pan noted that humanoid robots still face technological and practical limitations, and real-world application is key to their further development. Such events could yield positive effects in the entertainment and performance market, which is a necessary step forward in paving the way for further applications in factories or households, Pan said.

Tian Feng, former dean of SenseTime’s Intelligence Industry Research Institute, said that the free provision of T800 robots will lower research and development barriers for smaller companies and promote the integration of applications involving industry, academia, and research bodies.




The tournament’s opening night came on the heels of a series of artificial intelligence events hosted by the United Nations earlier this month, during which Secretary-General António Guterres said that “if AI is to be powerful, it must be governed,” and “my main concern is with ‘lethal autonomous weapon systems.’”

“Let us call them what they are: killer robots,” Guterres continued. “Machines selecting and engaging their target and taking a life—without human control and judgment. That is morally repugnant. It is politically unacceptable. And it must be banned by international law.”

“States are already at the discussion table. But let us not wait for atrocity to act. Some decisions must remain forever human—none more than taking a human life,” he added. “Some might claim that governance is the enemy of innovation. But innovation needs guardrails. The technologies we trust most—in aviation, in medicine, in nuclear energy and beyond—earned that trust because we acted to hold their makers to account.”

As Wired detailed in Friday reporting, “the US military has a long-standing interest in humanoids,” and Sankaet Pathak’s startup Foundation Future Industries aims to “produce an all-American robot supersoldier.”

The startup’s “unique in its targeting of the military market, and so far it’s been lucrative,” the outlet added. “The company has government contracts worth millions of dollars and high-profile backers to spread its message: Eric Trump, the president’s son, is both an investor and the company’s chief strategy adviser.”

This article has been updated to include the Wired reporting.