Stop Killer Robots

Stop Killer Robots is an international coalition of non-governmental organisations and academic partners working for new international law on autonomous weapons systems. The coalition's central demand is a legally binding instrument that prohibits weapons systems which target people or operate without meaningful human control, and that regulates all other autonomous weapons systems to ensure such control is preserved.

The coalition was founded by representatives of seven non-governmental organisations at a meeting in New York on 19 October 2012, and held its global launch at a conference in London in April 2013. The original founders were Article 36, Human Rights Watch, the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC), IKV Pax Christi (now PAX), Mines Action Canada, the Nobel Women's Initiative, and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Human Rights Watch co-ordinated the campaign from its founding until 2021, with Mary Wareham — advocacy director of HRW's Arms Division — serving as global co-ordinator from 2013 to March 2021, at which point co-ordination passed to a dedicated secretariat.

Structure and current leadership

By 2025 Stop Killer Robots describes itself as a coalition of more than 270 international, regional, and national NGOs and academic partners across 70 or more countries. The coalition is led by a Steering Committee of NGOs that sets strategic direction, with a Geneva-based secretariat handling day-to-day operations. National coalitions in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Ireland, the Philippines, Italy, and elsewhere co-ordinate domestic advocacy and feed into the global campaign.

Nicole van Rooijen joined as Executive Director in January 2025, coming from over a decade at the International Committee of the Red Cross, most recently as ICRC's Head of Protection for Asia Pacific. The coalition also runs Automated Decision Research, an in-house monitoring and research team led by Manager Dr Catherine Connolly that tracks state positions, publishes country-by-country analysis, and produces briefing material used by negotiators and journalists during UN cycles.

Approach and tactics

Stop Killer Robots is the longest-running civil-society effort directly engaged with what the corpus would call military-AI governance, and it predates the current AI-safety policy wave by about a decade. The coalition's core theory of change is treaty-driven humanitarian disarmament — the same model that produced the Mine Ban Treaty (1997) and the Convention on Cluster Munitions (2008), and which several of the coalition's member organisations were central to. Diplomatic advocacy at the UN — at the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) in Geneva, at the Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, and at the UN General Assembly First Committee in New York — is paired with public-facing campaigns, national-level lobbying, and engagement with academia, technologists, and faith and survivor communities.

The coalition's public-engagement work includes the #VoteAgainstTheMachine push around UN General Assembly votes, the touring Automated by Design exhibition on the human stakes of autonomy in weapons, and a regular presence at venues like RightsCon. National coalitions run parliamentary briefings, roving demonstrations, and citizen-survey work; the secretariat amplifies and connects this organising into the multilateral cycle.

Recent progress

The coalition has been working a steady upward gradient at the UN. In November 2023, the UN General Assembly First Committee adopted an Austria-led resolution on lethal autonomous weapons systems by 164 votes in favour, with 5 against and 8 abstentions — the first time the topic had been formally addressed in the General Assembly. The resolution mandated a report from the UN Secretary-General, published in August 2024, which called on states to conclude a treaty by 2026 prohibiting weapons that operate without human control or that cannot be used in compliance with international humanitarian law, and to regulate all other autonomous weapons.

In December 2024, UN General Assembly Resolution 79/62 — passed 166 in favour, 3 against, 15 abstaining — approved informal consultations in New York during 2025 to consider the Secretary-General's report. Those consultations ran on 12–13 May 2025 with delegations from 96 states. At the September 2025 GGE meeting in Geneva, Brazil delivered a joint statement on behalf of 42 states declaring readiness to move to negotiations on a legally binding instrument — a notable shift from the consensus-blocked CCW track that had defined the previous decade of GGE work.

Relationship to the broader AI-good movement

Stop Killer Robots sits at one of the most concrete edges of the AI-good landscape: the question of whether and how machines should ever apply lethal force without a human in the loop. Many newer AI-policy organisations — including youth-led groups like Encode Justice, which has worked on US federal restrictions on AI in nuclear-weapons command-and-control — explicitly cite autonomous-weapons advocacy as part of their inheritance, and several coalition members (Human Rights Watch, PAX, Article 36) routinely intersect with the civil-liberties, surveillance, and bias-audit communities. The coalition's enduring contribution to the broader movement is the demonstration that sustained civil-society pressure at the UN, paired with a clear humanitarian frame, can move the multilateral system on a fast-moving technology — and that this work depends on coalitions that bridge disarmament, human-rights, and tech-policy organising rather than treating any one of them as the centre of gravity.