The question

Who should be allowed to decide to take a human life? Weapons have killed without a person present for a long time, but the choice of target was always made by someone, somewhere, in advance. What is new is a machine that selects and engages a target on its own judgment. Governments have spent a decade arguing over whether to permit it. This is the record of what each of them has actually said, and where each of them has moved.

One country, one vote

In December 2023 the General Assembly voted on autonomous weapons for the first time. Resolution 78/241 asked governments to state a view, and for the first time the answers went on the record by name. Start with one of them. The United States voted in favour.

The mark teaches itself

Two more votes followed, one each year. The United States voted in favour again in 2024, then against in 2025. A filled disc is a vote in favour, a crossed ring is a vote against, a half-filled disc is an abstention, and a faint dash is a state that did not vote. The shapes sit beside the words that name them, so there is nothing to memorise and no key to consult.

The row persists

Hold onto that row. Every country has one, running left to right through the same decade. Nothing on this canvas is cleared or redrawn from scratch as you read. What you have already learned to read stays readable.

Color arrives: position, not vote

A vote is an act on a single day. Behind it sits a stated position, which this project codes from the public record and shows as a band beneath the marks. The United States backed non-binding measures from 2023, and in November 2025 it set out a preference for keeping the work inside the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. The band changes color there. The red seam marks the moment the position moved. Red is reserved on this site: it marks a change of position, or a correction to this project's own record, and nothing else.

A second country, moving the other way

India travelled the opposite road on the same three votes: against, then an abstention, then in favour. Two states, two arcs, crossing in the middle. What they do not show is two opposite positions. India's coded position held steady throughout, because its argument was always about which forum should do the work, and a change in how a state votes is not by itself a change in what it wants. That gap between the act and the position is the reason this site codes them separately.

The movers

They are not the only two that moved. Attendance changes are left out of this count, because missing a vote is not the same as changing your mind. The rows arrive sorted by when each state last moved, so the most recently unsettled sit at the top. Every glyph on screen was taught in the beats above.

The camps resolve

Step back from the movement and structure appears. One group of states wants a binding treaty with prohibitions in it. Another wants new international measures that are not legally binding. A few want no new law at all, and hold that the law of armed conflict already covers this. Some are genuinely hard to read, and this site says so rather than picking for them. The rows sort by coded position. They are described in the order the axis runs, and never ranked.

Every state, the full board

Here is the whole record: every member state, every recorded vote, and a position band wherever this project has coded one. Where no band appears, the track is left honestly empty. That is not a finding about the country. It is a statement about how far this project has read, and it marks the work still open.

The clock

A dated line runs down the right edge. The Seventh Review Conference of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons opens in Geneva on 16 November 2026, and it is the next moment at which any of this can turn into law. In September 2025, Brazil read a statement to the expert group on behalf of thirty-nine parties saying they were ready to begin negotiating. Everything to the left of that line is on the record. Everything to the right is still being decided. The board is yours from here: choose any row for the evidence behind it.

Source: Joint statement to the September 2025 session of the CCW GGE on LAWS (as delivered)