Iceland’s president details signed call to keep war decisions in human hands

Decisions about war and nuclear weapons must stay with people, Icelandic President Halla Tómasdóttir argues in an October 16 TIME Ideas essay. She describes “A Call from Reykjavík,” signed by three women presidents and open to further signatories, that seeks meaningful human control over powerful technologies. Her concern is the growing distance between wartime decisions and their human consequences.

Keeping authority with people

As Tómasdóttir describes it, the call sets a boundary around who should hold authority, rather than simply asking whether AI can perform a task. Powerful technologies should remain under meaningful human control, and decisions about war and nuclear weapons should remain firmly in human hands. The statement also makes peace and responsibility to future generations central duties of leadership.

Her concern about AI-assisted warfare is that it can put more distance between those making decisions and those living with the consequences. She argues that human judgment, accountability and conscience cannot be handed over to machines. This is an appeal about responsibility for the use of technology, not only about what the technology can do.

The essay presents the call as a statement others can join. It does not specify when it was signed or describe an enforcement system for its demands. Its emphasis is on the obligations leaders should accept as increasingly powerful tools become available.

The central question was not simply what AI can do, but what we should allow it to do—and who gets to decide.

Halla Tómasdóttir, President of Iceland, writing in TIME Ideas

Why the appeal came from Reykjavík

The call emerged from a gathering at Höfði House involving leaders from politics, technology, science, business and civil society, Tómasdóttir writes. The location carried a deliberate historical connection: Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met there 40 years earlier. Although that meeting ended without an agreement, she credits their willingness to engage with helping lay the groundwork for later nuclear arms reductions.

She describes a sequence of discussions in Iceland during the preceding week. A traveling exhibition from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and testimony from an atomic-bomb survivor brought the human consequences of nuclear weapons into view. Discussions with technology experts, including Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, then examined AI’s promises, dangers and the question of who should decide its permitted uses.

The day after the Höfði House gathering, Tómasdóttir joined Slovenia’s President Nataša Pirc Musar and former Irish President Mary Robinson for a public conversation moderated by Christiane Amanpour. In her account, bringing more voices into these discussions is part of the response: decisions about the future should not belong only to people who already hold power.

Accountability beyond the machine

Tómasdóttir’s argument extends beyond the leaders assembled at Höfði House. She describes young people across Iceland inviting students, parents, grandparents, teachers and neighbors to put down their phones and discuss their shared future. Those conversations covered education, belonging, technology, nature and peace. She says the young participants wanted a voice in decisions whose consequences would outlast today’s leaders.

She calls for stronger “human infrastructure”: relationships, institutions, shared values and habits of cooperation that help people respond collectively to danger. Education, in this view, should develop listening, critical thinking, empathy, courage and collaboration alongside technical skills. Her proposed response to powerful AI therefore includes the capacity of people and institutions to make decisions together, not just improvements to technology.

That emphasis comes with a qualification. Tómasdóttir says dialogue is neither a substitute for action nor a reason to abandon values, excuse aggression or accept injustice. Its purpose is not always consensus. She argues that listening across disagreement can build the trust needed for lasting action—and that dialogue alone will not be enough.