AI Regulation Bill

Baroness Antrobus Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Antrobus (Lab)]

I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, for this debate and for my first opportunity to speak in Grand Committee. I want to dwell on two connected examples that demonstrate both the potential benefits and dangers of using AI on the battlefield, including why defence needs a bespoke approach. In doing so, I acknowledge the excellent research of Katrina Manson and Kevin T Baker on the US development of AI in warfare under the auspices of Project Maven.

In 2011, a friendly fire incident took place, killing US marines fighting in Afghanistan. The troops were mistakenly identified as the Taliban and targeted by a US drone. However, the way in which the marines were arranged, prone on the ground, was not the way the Taliban fought. This motivated senior US officers to push for the increased use of AI in order to prevent human error and was a key factor in the journey that the US military took in developing Project Maven.

In March this year, US weapons hit a primary school in Minab in southern Iran, killing more than 150 people, mostly schoolgirls. The knee-jerk reaction was to blame AI, but people had built a system that was fast enough to make a failure to update the target database lethal. Nobody searched the database to check that the target was legitimate because, with the Project Maven system making 1,000 decisions an hour, nobody could.

I offer as a conclusion that the use of AI in warfare does not lend itself to cross-sector regulation; in fact, I am much persuaded by the approach suggested by the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, more generally. In the defence context, a question that remains unanswered is whether AI is a tool, with humans at the helm, or a killer in its own right. The ethical implications relate to the tension between reducing adherence to the law of armed conflict and risking unintended outcomes, or losing in warfare because the enemy has no qualms about those risks. There is no time now to dwell further on this important moral challenge, but perhaps we should debate it further in the House in future.