The Lead
Who Decides?
by Jason Ross (EIRNS) — Oct. 01, 2026
On Tuesday, delegation after delegation at the UN General Assembly called for “full human control” over nuclear weapons as artificial intelligence enters military systems, and the same afternoon six AI companies signed a voluntary pledge at the White House to police themselves. On Wednesday, the Pentagon gave its own answer to the question of the role of AI in warfare. Speaking at Quantico, War Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a new four-star Autonomous Warfare Command (Autowarcom) to build autonomous and robotic weapons across the joint force in what he called “the fastest peacetime shift in modern history.” “Today, with … Autowarcom, we institutionalize—and we supercharge—the era of [super intelligence], robotics and autonomous systems, all in order to win,” he said. A companion study group, with Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey and Newt Gingrich, is to identify “the domains we must conquer.” No account of the speech has him saying a word about human control over the use of lethal force.
The question has already been posed in Washington. EIR reported in February, when Anthropic refused to drop its two conditions for military use of its AI, “no mass domestic surveillance of Americans, and no fully autonomous weapons,” that Hegseth declared the company a “supply chain risk to national security.” In June, Sen. Adam Schiff introduced the Human Authority in Lethal Operations Act, which would require an accountable human commander for every AI-enabled weapon engagement and prohibit “removing a human from the chain of decisionmaking for … initiating or terminating nuclear weapons employment.” Americans are with him: in Tuesday’s Quinnipiac poll, 79% said safety matters more than staying ahead in AI.
In Moscow today, President Vladimir Putin addressed the same question at the Valdai Discussion Club. Technology, he said, is “taking the possibilities for the destruction of all humanity to a whole new level, be it as a result of military conflicts, rapid degradation of the environment, or loss of control over technological processes that have been set in motion.” He called for “refusing to allow the uncontrolled integration of such technologies into areas that have always been vital and sensitive to human moral development.” Putin gave the example of Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, who may have single-handedly prevented the extermination of the human race by refusing to pass up the chain of command a computer-generated assessment that the U.S. had launched nuclear missiles at the Soviet Union—an example used by EIR last week. Petrov was not a safeguard built into a machine. He was a man who reasoned that no one starts a nuclear war with five missiles, and who took the responsibility of saying so.
That is the point the words “human control” can obscure. A weapon is not a thing apart from the society that builds it. Lyndon LaRouche made the argument in 1985, when the first “artificial intelligence” boom was under way: technological advances “represent the imposition of forms created in the individual human mind, upon the productive process,” and the definition of intelligence adopted by the AI industry leaves out the creative act by which a mind discovers something it did not know before. A nation that sets its scientists to “conquer domains” and one that sets them, as LaRouche proposed in 1983, to “free the world from more than 20 years of thermonuclear terror” by “turning the science to assist the development of developing countries” are using the same technologies for opposite purposes. The machine does not decide that. People do, and they decide it in the kind of society they build.
So who decides? Putin said that “the major powers bear an enormous responsibility that matches their immense capabilities,” a potential that “gets multiplied by the innovative technologies.” They can move the world “towards achieving greater predictability and security or, conversely, towards exacerbating all existing problems.” That responsibility now has a time and place. China’s ambassador in Moscow, Zhang Hanhui, told Izvestia that a meeting of the leaders of Russia, China and the United States at the APEC summit in Shenzhen in November would be “very useful,” because “the future of this world depends on us.” Last week’s White House fact sheet on Xi Jinping’s visit already records a U.S.-China dialogue on “super intelligence” with a channel for incidents, and says both presidents intend to attend each other’s summits, APEC in Shenzhen in November and the G20 in Doral in December.
What can be done between now and then is concrete. Legislation can make meaningful requirements about having a human being in the loop. The U.S.-China artificial intelligence dialogue, due to meet by November, can take up what the UN heard on Tuesday and put human command of nuclear weapons on paper between the two powers. And the American people can insist that their government go to Shenzhen to agree with China and Russia that human beings will keep command of the weapons that can end humanity, rather than to “conquer domains.”
Contents
LaRouche movement
Strategic War Danger
- Pentagon Creates ‘Autonomous Warfare Command’ a Day After Calls at the UN for Human Control (↓)
- Russian Diplomat Says European Countries Deliberately Promoting Idea of War With Russia (↓)
- Tehran Rejects British Claim of Iran Being Behind Alleged Terror Plot (↓)
- Israel Demands Omani Co-Pilot After Flydubai Incident (↓)
Science and Technology
Collapsing Imperial System
New World Paradigm
- China Opens Four High-Speed Rail Lines (↓)
- Chinese Embassy Celebrates National Day with Considerable U.S. Diplomatic Presence (↓)
- Chinese Ambassador Suggests a Xi-Putin-Trump Meeting Would Be ‘Useful’ (↓)
- Lukashenko Proposes U.S. Join Russia and Belarus in Building New Fertilizer Plant (↓)
U.S. and Canada
Harley Schlanger Update
Watch The Daily Update with Harley Schlanger, a short video update available every weekday morning from The LaRouche Organization.
