Autonomous Warfare Does Not End at the Body is a bridge and disambiguation packet proposing semantic autonomy and Autonomous Semantic Warfare as analytic and governance categories.
The packet organizes autonomous operations into three layers. Kinetic autonomy concerns systems capable of selecting or engaging physical targets, commonly discussed through lethal autonomous weapons systems. Cognitive autonomy concerns operations that alter perception, decision-making, attention, or belief. Semantic autonomy concerns systems that can rank, erase, attribute, summarize, stabilize, or recompose the public meaning of persons, institutions, events, and concepts.
The document explicitly states that Autonomous Semantic Warfare is not a recognized legal category. It also rejects an unlimited definition. Ordinary ranking, summarization, citation error, or model failure does not automatically become warfare. The proposed threshold requires strategically consequential operations at population scale that materially alter the ability to know, retrieve, cite, remember, or contest an object.
Two forms are distinguished. Intentional ASW is deliberately designed or configured toward a semantic target. Structural ASW emerges from large-scale systems whose incentives and defaults repeatedly produce strategic erasure or stabilization even without a single commanding actor.
The same technologies can support democratic memory, public knowledge, and provenance when they are transparent, contestable, and governed under public oversight. The category is therefore diagnostic rather than a claim that autonomous semantic systems are inherently hostile.
The packet situates the proposal beside LAWS, cognitive warfare, information operations, provenance erasure, semantic liquidation, and canon formation. Its external policy chronology and institutional references require independent verification.