Chapter 8 looks at an Article 36 review of autonomous weapons systems. Having first addressed the progress of debates about potential future regulation of such systems at the international level, it delineates the notions of autonomy, artificial intelligence and learning systems. The chapter shows that military capabilities underpinned by machine learning and deep learning technologies require a new understanding of how provisions of targeting law can be meaningfully translated to the context of autonomous systems and examined in the framework of Article 36. It also demonstrates that determining the novel character of learning autonomous capabilities to ensure timely provision of legal advice, gaining assurance of complex adaptive systems’ performance accuracy and reliability, or identifying a set of requisite control measures, are all issues that ‘traditional’ weapons reviews do not have to grapple with at all, or at least not to the same extent. [143 words]

Chapter 9 focuses on an Article 36 review of (autonomous) cyber capabilities. As in the case of autonomous weapons systems, the most burning questions for a weapons review in the cyber context remain: How to meaningfully incorporate advice on the law of targeting as part of the weapons review? How to determine when a given capability is ‘new’ for review purposes and when to initiate a review? How and when can testing and evaluation processes meaningfully inform the review outcome? Furthermore, some challenges distinct to cyber capabilities also exist. Most importantly, cyber capabilities test the underlying assumptions of the law of armed conflict. The effects of their use may be more deleterious than the consequences produced by traditional weaponry, and yet they may fall outside the legal review requirement because the effects produced do not constitute an ‘attack’ in its conventional interpretation. [142 words]