South Korea hosted the second-ever Responsible Artificial Intelligence in the Military Domain summit on Sept. 9 and 10, during which 60 countries, including the United States, signed a “blueprint for action” regarding the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the military.

More than 90 countries were in attendance, and China was among the nations that did not endorse the ethical guidelines.

The inaugural meeting was held in The Hague, Netherlands, in 2023, where participating nations expressed support for an international framework for military AI use.

Among the details in this year’s blueprint were specific points regarding AI-enabled drone usage, risk assessment guidelines, the importance of maintaining human control, and preventing AI from being used to proliferate weapons of mass destruction.

Netherlands Defence Minister Ruben Brekelmans said progress is being made but said, “We will never have the whole world on board.”

“How do we deal with the fact that not everyone is complying? ... That is a complicated dilemma that we should also put on the table,” Brekelmans said.

Giacomo Persi Paoli, head of security and technology at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, said countries should engage with one another between summits to mitigate risks. The United Nations has also discussed creating international guidelines for lethal autonomous weapons.

“The blueprint is an incremental step forward,” Paoli said. “By going too fast, too soon, there is a very high risk that many countries do not want to engage.”

While the blueprint is not a legally binding document, China’s decision to opt out follows a pattern.

The Chinese communist regime has previously refused to follow international standards and ethics guidelines in other areas of advanced technologies, causing nations such as the United States to become increasingly concerned about technological advancements in the hands of a foreign adversary such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

In 2018, a Chinese scientist revealed he had created gene-edited babies. He Jiankui, who had never published peer-reviewed research, gene-edited human, mouse, and monkey embryos and implanted several gene-edited human embryos into a human uterus.

International guidelines on gene editing allow the implantation of genetically edited embryos only in limited cases. Under international pressure, He Jiankui was sentenced to prison, after which he said he would continue his research.

In March, a U.S. congressional hearing revealed that the CCP was also creating a genetic database of every human on Earth, which would flout medical privacy laws and international standards.

In the same month, a leading genetics journal issued a mass retraction of papers published by Chinese researchers after an investigation revealed inconsistencies and suggested that the DNA samples used may have come from prisoners of conscience persecuted by the CCP.

Reuters contributed to this report.