IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2021 - 25

Leading Edge
Can Open Source Licenses
Help Regulate Lethal Autonomous
Weapons?
Cheng Lin and AJung Moon
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A 0G4, Canada
 LethaL autonomous weapon systems (LAWS,
also known as killer robots) are a real and emerging
technology that have the potential to radically transform
warfare. Because of the myriad of moral, legal,
privacy, and security risks the technology introduces,
many scholars and advocates have called for
a ban on the development, production, and use of
fully autonomous weapons [1], [2].
However, banning LAWS internationally is not as
simple as signing a treaty. In order for a ban to be
effective, there should be a means of accountability
and control to ensure that the ban is respected by its
signatories [3]. Export control is a regulatory mechanism
that controls the distribution of certain goods
across a country's borders and has traditionally been
used to track and control the transfer of high-risk
commodities, such as weapons of war. The fact that
the critical functions of LAWS are largely dependent
on software (an " intangible " ) poses a number of
interesting challenges: Enforcing the export control
of LAWS is more difficult than enforcing the export
control of weapons whose components are " tangible, "
because software can be assembled by both
state and nonstate actors and can be easily distributed,
implemented, or changed remotely and after
the point of sale.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2021.3101832
Date of current version: 2 September 2021.
September 2021
Given the challenges of applying export control
to LAWS, the International Panel on the Regulation
of Autonomous Weapons (iPRAW) has suggested
the use of norm-setting instruments to either complement
or replace traditional LAWS regulation [4]. In
our recent work [5], we sought to explore this suggestion
by addressing the following question: Can
open source licenses help regulate the development
of lethal autonomous weapons?
Given the prevalence of open source within AI
and the increasing military interest in nonstate technology,
we believe that open source technology
will underpin future advances in lethal autonomous
weapons. In light of this, and the need for nontraditional
instruments to regulate LAWS, we analyzed
whether an open source license-a document that
accompanies all open source projects-prohibiting
the use of its source code in the development or
use of LAWS could realistically hinder the assembly
of a LAWS. The results of our preliminary analysis
suggests that while norm-setting instruments such as
open source licenses demonstrate theoretical promise
in regulating LAWS, their practical success faces
some key limiting factors.
Open source activism and LAWS
We first conducted a survey of activism within
the open source community. We found two broad
categories of open source activism. The first
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2021

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