Policy Brief No. 241 — July 2026
Time for Canada to Take a Stand on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems Craig Martin
Key Points → Canada has maintained an understandable posture of ambiguity on lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS), particularly within the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) process. → Canada should now take a stand within the CCW and support the negotiations based on a “rolling text” — a proposed multilateral framework for governing LAWS that is the most developed yet produced. → The substance of the rolling text is closely aligned with Canada’s stated positions on ensuring meaningful human control, as well as insisting that all aspects of the development and deployment of LAWS must be subject to, and comply with, international humanitarian law (IHL). Canada’s substantive contributions to the Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) within the CCW — including working papers on algorithmic bias and IHL-based regulatory architecture — and its legacy in humanitarian treaty-making position it well to lead on shaping the proposed prohibitions and regulations.
Introduction: The Issues Since the early 2010s, there have been debates over whether autonomous weapons systems (AWS) can fully comply with IHL, whether existing IHL treaty regimes can adequately govern the operation of AWS, and what form any new constraints on AWS should take. The primary forum for interstate discussion of these issues has been within the institutional framework of the CCW, and since 2016, by the GGE within the CCW. For many years that consensus-based process showed little hope of making any meaningful progress. Canada’s own approach to the issues has been characterized by studied ambiguity. On the one hand, it has articulated support for a ban on fully AWS and participated substantively in the GGE process. On the other hand, it has avoided any concrete support for the negotiation of new binding international obligations or even enacted any meaningful domestic constraints on military artificial intelligence (AI) adoption and AWS development at home. There are compelling reasons for Canada to now take a stand and even exercise leadership in resolving the issues regarding the governance of AWS. First, matters are coming to a head within the GGE. It was given a mandate by the CCW in 2023 to formulate a “set of elements of an instrument” to address the issues relating