Taser abandons plans to build stun gun-equipped drones for schools

Axon, the company formerly known as Taser, has abandoned plans to build a stun gun-equipped drone intended for deployment in schools after an “exodus” of resignations from its internal ethics board.

The company’s chief executive, Rick Smith, said in a statement: “I want to be explicit: I announced a potential delivery date a few years out as an expression of what could be possible; it is not an actual launch timeline, especially as we are pausing that program. A remotely operated non-lethal Taser-enabled drone in schools is an idea, not a product, and it’s a long way off. We have a lot of work and exploring to see if this technology is even viable and to understand if the public concerns can be adequately addressed before moving forward.”

According to Reuters, the statement was made in response to the resignation of nine of the 12 members of the company’s ethics board. Smith obliquely criticised the resignations but did not directly address them, saying only that it was “unfortunate that some members of Axon’s ethics advisory panel have chosen to withdraw from directly engaging on these issues before we heard or had a chance to address their technical questions. We respect their choice and will continue to seek diverse perspectives to challenge our thinking and help guide other technology options that we should be considering.”

Axon had announced its plans late last week, framing them as a direct response to the shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas. The remotely operated drone, visualised in a mock-up as a bright yellow device bristling with cameras and weaponry, was intended to be “capable of incapacitating an active shooter in less than 60 seconds”.

Those plans were announced against the direct wishes of the company’s internal ethics board. The board had been presented with the idea of a stripped-back version of the project that would only have involved handing the technology to police departments, and still came out strongly against the proposals. But after the two shootings, Axon said, it decided to proceed anyway, and “asked the board to consider issuing further guidance”.

When the board’s guidance arrived, it was vehement: “Reasonable minds can differ on the merits of police-controlled Taser-equipped drones – our own board disagreed internally – but we unanimously are concerned with the process Axon has employed regarding this idea of drones in school classrooms.”

In Smith’s initial announcement of the proposal, he directed people towards a comic book he had co-written, called The End of Killing, in which he “described in detail how such a system could work” through an imagined counterterror operation in Syria carried out almost entirely by Taser-equipped robots.