NATO’s first AI strategy from 2021 outlines six guiding principles: lawfulness, responsibility and accountability, explainability and traceability, reliability, governability, and bias mitigation. Together, these principles form the ethical and operational baseline guiding how NATO and its members design, deploy and govern AI in defence contexts. But the world of AI has evolved drastically since 2021.
The 2024 strategy was more about practical applications, emphasizing cooperation of non-traditional defence suppliers for AI research and development with industry, academia and national defence agencies. NATO’s evolving AI strategy is part of larger initiatives toward rapid technological adaptation, innovating AI among other priority areas, including autonomous systems, with programs that support responsible AI operationalization scaling rapidly to meet the growing need for fast action on responsible AI use. Allies foster responsible AI developments that benefit from alignment with these NATO strategies and programs, building innovation clusters that are interoperable and interdisciplinary across domains.
