The results suggest a cultural shift, as the government of Chancellor Friedrich Merz no longer explicitly excludes lethal decisions without human checks.
It also puts Germany in a different category than some of its allies: In the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and France, 26 percent of respondents said militaries could rely on AI rather than human decision — or roughly a quarter of people.
Forty-seven percent of German respondents still favored human involvement in the use of weapons, even if they are slower than AI. But that figure was 10 percentage points lower than responses to the same question in the U.K., eight points lower than in the U.S. and Canada, and five percentage points lower than in France.
Almost half of respondents in Germany (46 percent) said cybersecurity and artificial intelligence capabilities mattered as much as traditional military power to win wars.
The online survey, conducted for POLITICO by the independent London-based polling company Public First, comes as political leaders, security chiefs and industry officials gather in Germany for the Munich Security Conference. Part of their discussions get into how technologies like AI are changing the nature of warfare and national security strategies.
The relatively high acceptance of so-called lethal autonomous weapons systems — also known as “killer robots” — is surprising when considering Berlin’s slow uptake of new technologies and its deep cultural attachment to data protection, which is being put under pressure by new AI applications.