PIL Discussion Group: State responsibility in the age of military AI

The modern battlefield is rapidly evolving, with belligerents increasingly using AI-enabled weapons and decision support systems in their military operations. This development raises numerous challenges for international law, including with regard to accountability for AI-enabled conduct that breaches international humanitarian law (IHL). Accountability is complicated by the 'many hands problem', namely, the fact that multiple actors including states, technology companies, and individuals might contribute towards a single harmful outcome involving an AI-enabled system. Further difficulties arise due to the degree of autonomy with which many AI-enabled systems operate, meaning that the harmful outcomes they cause might be wholly unintended and unforeseen by the human developer or operator.  This presentation will consider how these features of military AI might impact state responsibility for IHL violations involving AI-enabled systems. It will assess how the various rules of attribution might apply to conduct involving AI, including when the acts of private technology companies might be attributable to a state, and how the use of AI capabilities might influence the way we think about state control. It will also examine some scenarios in which two or more states might share responsibility for violations involving AI-enabled systems. These include coalition operations in which states might jointly violate IHL through their development and/or use of an AI capability, or in which one state aids or assists another's AI-enabled conduct in breach of IHL. In addition, the presentation will address adversarial action by one state against another's AI capabilities, examining which state or states bears responsibility if their combined actions (respectively deploying the AI system and interfering in its operation) result in a breach of IHL.

Dr Jenny Maddocks is a Lecturer in International and Operational Law at the University of Reading. She was previously an Assistant Professor in the Department of Law and Philosophy at the US Military Academy West Point, and a Faculty Fellow with the Lieber Institute for Law and Warfare. In that role, she served as Managing Editor for the digital publication, Articles of War. Prior to joining West Point, Dr Maddocks served for more than thirteen years as an officer in the British Army Legal Service, gaining considerable operational experience including deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Her monograph, Attribution of Non-State Actor Conduct During Armed Conflict, was published by OUP in 2026. She is co-editor in chief of the Journal of International Humanitarian Legal Studies.