On November 13, 2017, the Future of Life Institute (FLI) released a short film called Slaughterbots. The video depicts a near-future scenario in which swarms of small, cheap drones use AI and facial recognition to find and kill targets on their own, dramatizing what FLI describes as “a world in which autonomous weapons have been allowed to proliferate.” It was tied to advocacy by the institute and AI researchers, including Berkeley computer scientist Stuart Russell, who appears in the film.
FLI defines the weapons at issue as systems that “use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to identify, select, and kill human targets without human intervention.” The institute’s stated goal is “the formation of a new treaty on autonomous weapons,” arguing that some autonomous weapons “must be banned - specifically, those which target humans, which are highly unpredictable, or which function beyond meaningful human control,” while others should be regulated.
The film was designed as a piece of advocacy rather than a documentary, and it spread widely online and was shown around meetings of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. FLI later released a sequel, “Slaughterbots - if human: kill(),” on November 30, 2021.
Slaughterbots became one of the most visible public interventions in the autonomous weapons debate. Supporters credited it with raising awareness of the issue, while critics argued it dramatized a speculative scenario. Either way, it illustrated how AI researchers were willing to campaign publicly to shape the rules around military uses of the technology they helped build.