This bill establishes requirements ensuring that humans maintain meaningful control over autonomous weapon systems used by the Department of Defense. It defines "ultimate human responsibility" as the ability of human commanders and operators to understand, supervise, intervene in, or terminate the use of force by autonomous systems, and ensures compliance with U.S. and international law. The Department of Defense must design autonomous weapons with features like human oversight mechanisms, fail-safe controls, and systems that provide operators with sufficient information to understand and control the weapon's behavior. Before deploying any autonomous weapon capable of independently selecting and engaging targets, the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation must certify compliance with the bill's requirements, including rigorous adversarial testing to evaluate vulnerabilities under realistic combat conditions. The bill also requires the Defense Department to establish training programs for operators, create an incident repository to track weapon system failures and malfunctions, establish testing standards within 18 months, and create a new Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Office. The Secretary of Defense must report to Congress annually for the first six years on autonomous weapon systems in development and deployed by the military, along with steps taken to ensure human control remains in place.
Take Action
Your position
Add a comment
to comment on this bill.
Annotate the text
Highlight any passage on the Summary or Full Text tab to attach a note. Annotations appear on the Annotations tab.