The region’s AI laws stop where the drones start

The states of Central Asia and the South Caucasus are writing rules for artificial intelligence and buying drones in the same years, but the two efforts do not meet. The civilian AI laws now appearing in the region say little or nothing about weapons. The one forum drafting rules for autonomous weapons, the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in Geneva, does not include the two regional states with the most experience of drone warfare. If governance of military AI arrives in this region, it will arrive late and from outside, unless governments decide to write it themselves.

What Kazakhstan’s law does and does not cover

Kazakhstan’s Law No. 230-VIII "On Artificial Intelligence", signed on 17 November 2025 and in force since 18 January 2026, is the most complete AI statute in the region. It sorts systems into minimal, medium and high risk, requires labelling of synthetic content and bans a list of practices: manipulative techniques, exploiting a person’s vulnerabilities, social scoring, emotion recognition without consent and biometric classification for discriminatory ends. The prohibitions are drawn from consumer protection and privacy. None concerns the use of force.

The more interesting clause is quieter. Article 17 classifies systems by autonomy. At the top sits "high autonomy": systems whose decisions a human cannot correct or cancel, either by design or because it is technically impossible. That is close to the definition most governments use in Geneva for a fully autonomous weapon. The law then says that the particulars of creating and operating such systems will be set by other laws. It names the category that matters most for defence and leaves it empty.

We could not find a general scope exclusion for military or security uses in the published text, of the kind the EU wrote into its own act. The practical effect is similar, because nothing in the law’s obligations is designed for a weapons programme. Article 2 does something else worth noting: ratified international treaties take priority over the law. A future treaty on autonomous weapons would therefore sit above it.

The EU model stops at the barracks gate

The region often borrows from EU regulation, and here the template is explicit. Article 2(3) of the EU AI Act, Regulation 2024/1689, says the act does not apply to AI systems used "exclusively for military, defence or national security purposes", whoever operates them. Recital 24 adds that a military system repurposed for civilian, humanitarian or policing use comes back into scope. Brussels regulated the civilian market and left defence to member states and to international law.

That choice made sense for the EU, whose members sit inside NATO and inside the CCW, and which has other instruments for arms exports. It travels less well to states that copy the civilian half of the design without the surrounding structure. A government that adopts an EU-style AI law has regulated the chatbot and the credit score. It has not said anything about the loitering munition.

What Ukraine shows about how autonomy arrives

The war in Ukraine is the best evidence of how autonomy enters armed forces, and it does not come as a single decision to field a fully autonomous weapon. A CSIS study by Kateryna Bondar, published in March 2025, found that Ukraine produced about 2 million drones in 2024, more than 1.5 million of them first-person-view types, and began buying 10,000 AI-enhanced drones that year. Operators told the author that most FPV missions succeed 10–15 per cent of the time, and that autonomous navigation in the final approach could lift that to 70–80 per cent. Those are frontline estimates from interviews, not measured data, and should be read as such.

The same study found that Ukraine keeps a human in the loop for engagement decisions and that full autonomy was not yet present on the battlefield. The pressure runs in one direction, though. Electronic warfare cuts the link between operator and drone, and the cheapest answer is to let the machine finish the attack alone. Autonomy creeps in through the terminal phase, as a fix for jamming, and each step looks like an engineering improvement rather than a policy choice. That is precisely why it needs rules written before it becomes routine.

Procurement is already moving

The South Caucasus has fought one drone war and is still buying drones. Baykar, the Turkish manufacturer, notes that Azerbaijan used its TB2 drones against Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh. In April 2023 the two sides signed a memorandum on building Baykar drones in Azerbaijan, and in February 2024, at a ceremony attended by President Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan opened a training centre and hangar for the larger Akinci. Armenia, for its part, announced on 9 February 2026 that it had bought V-BAT reconnaissance drones from the United States for $11 million under the US Foreign Military Sales programme. The V-BAT is a surveillance platform, not a weapon, but reconnaissance drones are the eyes of the strike systems that follow.

None of this is unusual, and none of it is prohibited. The point is that neither country’s procurement is shaped by any published national rule on autonomy in weapons, and neither is bound by the treaty process that might produce one.

Geneva is where the rules are being written

The Group of Governmental Experts on lethal autonomous weapons, set up under the CCW, has been working from a "rolling text" of elements for an instrument. Its mandate ends in 2026 and it reports to the CCW’s Seventh Review Conference in November. On 6 November 2025 the UN General Assembly’s First Committee backed a resolution urging the group to finish the elements, by 156 votes to 5 with 8 abstentions; the General Assembly adopted it in December as resolution 80/57. At the group’s March 2026 session more than 70 states supported moving to negotiations, according to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which monitors the talks. The United States objected to the phrase "human control", proposing "good faith human judgement and care" instead.

Membership matters here. The UN Office for Disarmament Affairs lists Georgia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Ukraine as parties to the convention. Armenia and Azerbaijan are on its list of states not party. Kyrgyzstan is also absent from the list of parties. So a treaty negotiated under the CCW would bind most of Central Asia and none of the South Caucasus’s two main military rivals.

There is an odd asymmetry in the voting. Armenia and Kazakhstan both co-sponsored the 2025 General Assembly resolution. Kazakhstan can follow its vote into the Geneva room. Armenia cannot, because it is outside the treaty whose negotiations it asked for.

What regional governments could do now

The Review Conference may launch negotiations, or it may not; the convention works by consensus. Either way, a binding text would take years. Waiting for it leaves the region’s procurement decisions governed by supplier practice and battlefield need.

Kazakhstan has the easiest path. Its own law already defines high-autonomy systems and promises a separate statute for them. A short law or defence ministry order requiring that a human can override any weapon’s engagement decision would fill that gap and match the direction of the Geneva text. It would also give Astana a concrete national practice to cite in negotiations it has publicly supported.

Armenia and Azerbaijan face a harder problem, since the CCW is tied up in their bilateral politics. Neither needs to join the convention to adopt a unilateral declaration on human control over the use of force, or to write it into procurement contracts. If a peace settlement changes the politics of joining, accession should be early on the list; the rules on autonomy will by then be the part of the convention with the most practical bearing on their militaries.

What to watch

Three things before the end of the year. First, whether the November Review Conference agrees a negotiating mandate and what language on human control survives. Second, whether Kazakhstan drafts the high-autonomy law its own statute promises, and whether it covers the armed forces. Third, whether the next round of drone contracts in the Caucasus, from any supplier, comes with published terms on human oversight. If none of these moves, the region will keep regulating the AI it worries least about and leave unregulated the systems that can kill.

Sources

• Law of the Republic of Kazakhstan No. 230-VIII “On Artificial Intelligence”, 17 November 2025 (PRG/Paragraph text)
• EUR-Lex — Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (Artificial Intelligence Act), 13 June 2024
• CSIS — Kateryna Bondar, “Ukraine’s Future Vision and Current Capabilities for Waging AI-Enabled Autonomous Warfare”, 6 March 2025
• Baykar — “Azerbaijan opens facilities for new Akinci drone”, 9 February 2024
• Armenpress — “Armenia acquires V-BAT drones from U.S. – Prime Minister”, 9 February 2026
• UN Office for Disarmament Affairs — High Contracting Parties and Signatories, CCW
• Stop Killer Robots — “156 states support UNGA resolution on autonomous weapons”, 6 November 2025
• WILPF — CCW Report, Vol. 14, No. 2, “The Final Stretch Before the Finishing Line”, 11 March 2026