The Ethics of Autonomous Weapons Systems

The Ethics of Autonomous Weapons Systems

Author: Software Engineering Daily April 30, 2026 Duration: 1:06:40

Artificial intelligence is transforming warfare faster than the legal and ethical frameworks designed to govern it. Militaries around the world are deploying AI-powered decision support systems to identify targets, assess proportionality, and direct weapons. The gap between what is technically possible and what international law can effectively regulate is widening by the day.

Yuval Shany is a law professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a research fellow at the Oxford Ethics in AI Institute. He also served on the UN Human Rights Committee, where he first encountered the legal and ethical challenges posed by autonomous weapons systems. His research focuses on the intersection of international humanitarian law, human rights, and emerging military technologies.

In this episode, Yuval joins Matt Merrill for a wide-ranging conversation. They cover topics including how close we are to fully autonomous lethal weapons, the accountability gap that AI-mediated warfare creates, and what lessons software engineers can draw from these challenges when building consequential AI systems of any kind.

Matt Merrill is a software engineering leader with over 20 years of experience building and scaling software teams across enterprise and product-focused organizations. His background is in backend development, cloud architecture, and distributed systems design. He currently architects and delivers software products and leads a team of engineers at DEPT® Agency. You can learn more about his work at code.theothermattm.com.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

The post The Ethics of Autonomous Weapons Systems appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.


Dive deep into the conversations shaping the future of artificial intelligence with the Machine Learning Archives-Software Engineering Daily. This curated collection pulls from the broader Software Engineering Daily library, focusing entirely on the intricate world of ML engineering. Each episode features a detailed, technical interview with engineers, researchers, and architects who are building the systems behind today's most advanced AI. You'll hear them break down complex topics like model deployment, data pipeline challenges, and the practical trade-offs involved in taking research from a notebook into production. The discussions are grounded in real-world implementation, moving beyond theoretical concepts to explore the tools, failures, and successes that define the field. For developers and technical leaders looking to understand the nuts and bolts of applied machine learning, this podcast offers a valuable archive of knowledge. It's a direct line to the practitioners who are solving hard problems every day, providing insights you can apply to your own work. Tune in to gain a clearer perspective on how machine learning is integrated into modern software, one detailed conversation at a time.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 50

Software Engineering Daily
Podcast Episodes
Rebuilding the Cloud for AI Agent Code [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 49:57
For two decades, the cloud has been shaped by human developers writing code and managing its deployment. Now a growing share of production code is generated by LLMs with little human review. Because that code is not full…
SED News: The Kimi Moment, Runaway AI, and Tokenmaxxing [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 48:28
SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer break down the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry. In this…
The Terminal as an Agentic Interface [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 52:21
The terminal has been a constant in software development for decades. It has remained largely unchanged while everything around it transformed. However, as AI agents have become central to the developer workflow, the ter…
AI-Powered Threats to the Software Supply Chain [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 57:21
Open source software underpins virtually every modern application. That ubiquity is a superpower for developers, but it is also an expanding attack surface. Software supply chain attacks were once rare but are now happen…
Docker and Sandboxing AI Agents [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 50:50
The most useful coding agents can mutate their environments by downloading packages, writing files, and connecting to services across the network. However, that freedom also presents dangers, and promises to usher in a n…
The Startup Scene in Southeast Asia [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 43:50
Golden Gate Ventures is one of Southeast Asia’s most established early-stage venture firms, having backed companies across the region since 2011. They have invested in companies that are now household names in the region…
NanoClaw and the Rise of Personal AI Agents [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:03:35
AI agents have shown remarkable potential to function as persistent digital assistants that are capable of monitoring data, managing communications, and taking action autonomously over long periods. OpenClaw was one of t…
Agentic DevOps at AWS [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 51:56
AI agents have become capable of reasoning across large amounts of data, calling tools, and taking sequences of actions autonomously. These qualities make them well suited to some of the most persistent pain points in De…
AURA and Open-Source Agents for Production Operations [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 53:04
AI agents have transformed how software gets written, but the operational side of running software in production has not yet experienced a similar revolution. The same teams responsible for keeping systems healthy, inves…
Eric Ries on Why Good Companies Go Bad [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 50:28
Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup method and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, which transformed how a generation of founders and engineers think about building products. It introdu…