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Loitering problem: how defence technology becomes uninvestable before it becomes illegal
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Assets exposed to autonomous weapons risk, including AI-enabled drones, justify enhanced contractual protections and should command a premium return. This article argues that the risk arises not from the legality of the weapon itself but from the possibility of rapid reclassification outside the legislative process. Armed drones are not per se unlawful weapons, nor equivalent to mines or cluster munitions. But the cluster munition precedent shows how a weapons class can be excluded from large parts of the investable universe by an empirical property identified only after deployment. AI-enabled drones carry a similar exposure, except that the relevant property is software which can change after investment.
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