Bridging Understandings of the Military AI Lifecycle: A Transdisciplinary Socio-Technical Approach to Governance
Publish Date: 2026-06-12 08:02:00
Source Domain: opiniojuris.org
[Jessica Dorsey is an Assistant Professor of International Law at Utrecht University School of Law; Zena Assaad is an Associate Professor at the School of Engineering, Australian National University; Elke Schwarz is a Professor of Political Theory at Queen Mary University London; Ingvild Bode is a Professor of International Relations, University of Southern Denmark. The authors are all members of the Independent Advisory Board on Legal Reviews of the Responsible by Design Institute.]
As governments, military officials, technical experts, legal advisers, scholars and civil society representatives gather in Geneva next week for the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) informal consultations on emerging technologies and international security, discussions of military artificial intelligence (AI) will repeatedly engage a familiar concept: the lifecycle.
The term has proliferated in recent years and across contexts: It is found in technical frameworks, governance frameworks, procurement guidance, safety engineering practices, best practices toolkits, and increasingly in international discussions concerning military AI and autonomous systems. Yet despite its prevalence, there are unresolved divergences in how the lifecycle for military AI systems is understood and represented.
Some may chalk this up to a semantic disagreement, but, we posit, it goes beyond this. Different understandings of the military AI lifecycle shape fundamentally different approaches to governance, responsibility, accountability, and ultimately the role of human judgment in military decision-making. This proposition sits at the center of a side event we are holding at next week’s UNODA meetings, Assurance, Accountability, and Autonomy: Responsible Military AI Lifecycle Governance. In preparing for this event, we encountered these interpretive divergences ourselves and found them important to surface via this post, with the aim to ground the discussion in a more…
