Call it “bots on the ground.”
One in three Germans think their country should allow artificial intelligence to make life-or-death decisions on the battle field, according to The POLITICO Poll.
A third of respondents in Germany said they favor AI systems to be used in weapons in place of human decision makers, even if these systems are less transparent, the poll showed.
The results suggest a cultural shift, as the government of Chancellor Friedrich Merz no longer explicitly excludes lethal decisions without human checks.
It also puts Germany in a different category than some of its allies: In the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and France, 26 percent of respondents said militaries could rely on AI rather than human decision — or roughly a quarter of people.
Forty-seven percent of German respondents still favored human involvement in the use of weapons, even if they are slower than AI. But that figure was 10 percentage points lower than responses to the same question in the U.K., eight points lower than in the U.S. and Canada, and five percentage points lower than in France.
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Almost half of respondents in Germany (46 percent) said cybersecurity and artificial intelligence capabilities mattered as much as traditional military power to win wars.
The online survey, conducted for POLITICO by the independent London-based polling company Public First, comes as political leaders, security chiefs and industry officials gather in Germany for the Munich Security Conference. Part of their discussions get into how technologies like AI are changing the nature of warfare and national security strategies.
The relatively high acceptance of so-called lethal autonomous weapons systems — also known as “killer robots” — is surprising when considering Berlin’s slow uptake of new technologies and its deep cultural attachment to data protection, which is being put under pressure by new AI applications.
Germany has also had a fiery public debate over killer robots in past years. In 2021, a survey commissioned by an NGO coalition campaigning against killer robots said only 19 percent of respondents approved of such autonomous weapon systems, and 68 percent expressed ethical concerns about lethal decisions made without human control. Three years earlier, in 2018, 72 percent of respondents were against autonomous weapon systems.
Berlin’s governing coalition, which took office last year, no longer explicitly excluded lethal decisions without human control in its coalition agreement — unlike the center-to-left coalition government that preceded it.
AI-enabled weapons have changed the war in Ukraine, where drones have become a chief vector for armies to hit critical military and strategic targets, often operating independently.
Germany is preparing to spend €267.7 million on a new drone system from defense startup Helsing, but field data from deployments in Ukraine showed its drones have performed far below expectations, POLITICO reported last month.
United Nations Secretary General António Guterres has long opposed these weapons, calling them “politically unacceptable and morally repugnant.” But years of discussions between governments at the U.N. have so far not yield clear rules on their use.
The EU has its AI Act in place since 2024 to deal with the risks stemming from AI, but those rules don’t apply to military applications, which are a sovereign competence of member countries.
This edition of The POLITICO Poll was conducted by Public First from Feb. 6 to 9, surveying 10,289 adults online, with at least 2,000 respondents each from the U.S., Canada, U.K., France and Germany. Results for each country were weighted to be representative on dimensions including age, gender and geography. The overall margin of sampling error is ±2 percentage points for each country. Smaller subgroups have higher margins of error.
The survey is an ongoing project from POLITICO and Public First, an independent polling company headquartered in London, to measure public opinion across a broad range of policy areas. You can find new surveys and analysis each month at politico.com/poll. Have questions or comments? Ideas for future surveys? Email us at poll@politico.com.
Sam Clark reported from Brussels. Anouk Schlung contributed reporting from Berlin. Pieter Haeck contributed reporting from Brussels.
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