Amnesty International is a civil society organisation that undertakes research and action focused on preventing and ending grave abuses of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights instruments.
Amnesty International contributes to international discussions, publishes papers and reports on artificial intelligence (AI), and engages in advocacy.
Through the collective Amnesty Tech, Amnesty International is conducting research to determine what human fundamental rights look like in the digital age. The collective also identifies opportunities for strategic litigation to secure accountability for human rights abuses arising from the dominance of the big tech firms and their misuse of big data and AI.
Amnesty International has also established the AI and human rights initiative to tackle current and future human rights challenges posed by AI technologies, and advocates for the development of human rights principles for AI.
Amnesty International advocates strongly for a total ban on the development, deployment, and use of lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) alongside the Campaign against Killer Robots.
In 2018, together with Access Now, Amnesty International launched a declaration on human rights and AI titled The Toronto Declaration on protecting the rights to equality and non-discrimination in machine learning systems.
The organisation also advocates against the use of facial recognition technology and has supported calls for countries such as the UK and Russia to stop employing the technology due to its incompatibility with human rights.
- Advocates for the establishment of a global ban on lethal and less-lethal killer robots.
- Advocates for the applicability of frameworks of international human rights law and standards in the use of AI and machine learning.
- Outlines state responsibilities under international human rights law.