The Eleventh Conference of States Parties to the Arms Trade Treaty is now inked on the calendar for late summer, and the preparatory rhythm that began in February has already signalled the themes likely to dominate Geneva this year. The ATT community is wrestling with three connected problems: shallow universalization, slipping transparency in reporting, and the technical challenge of accounting for parts and components in an era when software and modular autonomy increasingly determine lethality. These are not discrete policy puzzles. They are philosophical problems about responsibility, epistemology, and the limits of rule writing in a rapidly shifting technological landscape.

The ATT secretariat and civil society actors have framed the coming conference as one where implementation realities will be tested against political declarations. The working group meetings held in February laid groundwork on implementation matters and on how to square existing treaty language with contemporary supply chains. This is where the debate over parts and components, often technical and seemingly niche, becomes central to regulating systems that integrate sensors, actuators, processors, and opaque proprietary software. If you cannot define what counts as a regulated item, you cannot build a consistent denial or diversion assessment regime.

Civil society monitoring has sharpened attention on two related metrics: national reporting under Article 13 and the treatment of parts and components under Article 4. Independent monitoring indicates implementation gaps and a troubling decline in routine reporting by States Parties, even as more weapons and enabling technologies flow across borders. For those of us focused on robotics and autonomous systems, this matters because much of the transfer activity that shapes operational outcomes is invisible inside complex industrial ecosystems. The policy question is not merely whether states export platforms, but whether they account for the distributed ecosystems that make modern platforms effective.

The European Union and other regional actors have been moving to tighten export control frameworks in ways that echo ATT norms. Recent adjustments to licensing guidance and national practices suggest a willingness to incorporate broader risk criteria into export decisions, including concerns such as gender based violence and humanitarian harm that the ATT community has emphasized. These shifts at the regional level will be a live test of whether treaty norms are meaningful beyond rhetorical commitment. For those designing autonomous systems, these policy shifts imply greater scrutiny on provenance, end use verification, and design choices that affect transferability.

For technologists and strategists worried about autonomous weapons, CSP11 is not an abstract diplomatic ritual. It is the venue where the practical implications of current legal language will be debated and where political momentum for clarity or ambiguity will be renewed. The insistence by civil society on parts and components matters because autonomy is often instantiated in code, middleware, and integrated sensor suites that cross national and industrial boundaries. A literal focus on platforms alone will leave large vectors of capability unregulated. Conversely, overbroad or poorly drafted controls risk stifling benign dual use research and humanitarian applications, such as demining robots or lifesaving unmanned logistics. The policy craft we need is surgical and evidence based, not maximalist or naive.

There is, finally, an ethical argument embedded in these procedural debates. When machines become decisive agents in battlefield outcomes, the chain of responsibility becomes diffuse. The ATT is a political project built to channel responsibility upward to States. If that chain is to remain meaningful, the community must design reporting, verification, and control measures that reflect the distributed nature of technological agency. That will require more than technical annexes and working papers. It will require a philosophical recalibration that recognizes the hybrid nature of contemporary weapon systems and insists that law and policy follow capability, not manufacturing form factors. CSP11 is the next chapter in that ongoing project. If the conference chooses clarity and technical nuance over slogans, the treaty can remain a living instrument fit for a century defined by modular autonomy. If not, the legal gaps will be the spaces where accountability dissolves and where the true costs of automation will be borne by civilians and by the soldiers whose decisions are reshaped by machines.