Humanitarian-disarmament treaty for a class of weaponised AI

Build a long-running coalition of NGOs, sympathetic states, faith communities, and survivors that campaigns for a binding multilateral treaty banning or restricting a specific class of AI weapon system. The coalition runs in parallel through the formal UN process (CCW, General Assembly, regional forums) and through public mobilisation in client states, while assembling the evidence base — humanitarian impact, military doctrine, weapons-review precedent — that the diplomatic track will draw on.

An actor chooses this approach because nation-state behaviour around weapons is bound by treaty more than by anything else, and because the humanitarian-disarmament lineage has a working playbook for it: landmines, cluster munitions, blinding lasers. The form is slow but it does not require any one government — once a critical mass of middle powers commits, the treaty creates a norm that constrains even non-signatories, by changing what is procurable, fundable, and publishable.

It trades off pace for permanence. The horizon is a decade; the campaign carries dead weight through several political cycles before producing visible movement; and it depends on the great-power calculation that being seen to object is more costly than acquiescing — a calculation that can fail.