Direct Causation in International Humanitarian Law and the Challenge of AI-Mediated Civilian Cyber Operations 文章

ArXiv CS.AI2026-06-30PAPERen作者: Alice Saito, Harold Godsoe, Phan Xuan Tan

详细信息

来源站点
ArXiv CS.AI
作者
Alice Saito, Harold Godsoe, Phan Xuan Tan
文章类型
PAPER
语言
en
发布日期
2026-06-30

摘要

arXiv:2606.29175v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: International humanitarian law protects civilians from direct attack unless and for such time as they take direct part in hostilities, with the ICRC's 2009 Interpretive Guidance operationalising this rule through a three-criterion cumulative test. This paper argues that AI-mediated civilian cyber operations challenge the direct causation element of this test in a structurally specific way: when a civilian deploys an autonomous multi-agent cyber system of the kind recently demonstrated in offensive AI research, the "one causal step" standard fails because harm is produced by system-generated decisions made after human disengagement, and the integral-part requirement does not extend because it presupposes downstream human contributors whose conduct can be independently classified.