Lawful Operational Safeguards in AI Systems: Surrender Recognition, Compliance Architecture, and International Humanitarian Law

Counts differ because each database indexes a different set of publications. We treat OpenAlex as the canonical count; Google Scholar is not shown (no API, and crawling it violates its ToS).

The prohibition on attacking a person hors de combat is a rule of customary international humanitarian law, reflected in Rule 47 of the ICRC Customary IHL Study and historically expressed in Article 23(c) of the Hague Regulations. Its practical operation presupposes that an intention to surrender, where it arises, can be expressed, perceived and translated into the withholding of attack before force becomes irreversible. This paper argues that preserving that interval — the recognition window — is not a new obligation but a condition of effectiveness of obligations that have bound parties for over a century. It identifies four conditions on the architecture of an operational system, each fixed before deployment rather than in the field: that a window exists; that the system holds an internal state on which a change of protected status can operate; that the function registering the change does not depend on the processing chain that produced the engagement decision; and that what the system retains during an engagement allows the question to be answered afterwards. Where the foreseeable normal use of a system would engage persons who, in the circumstances, should be recognised as hors de combat, review must examine whether the system preserves the practical possibility of compliance. The systematic exclusion of technically achievable safeguards relevant to that question is a decision the law has the instruments to examine, and, where a procedural regime applies, one to be justified on the record there.