A war that helped turn hobby drones into flying bombs is now doing the same for AI-guided killers. On Ukraine's 800-mile front, both Kyiv and Moscow are fielding drones that can increasingly fly, hunt, and strike with little human control, sometimes completing the final lethal seconds of an attack on their own, reports the New York Times. Ukraine has become a live-fire lab where government officials, arms makers, coders, and venture capitalists test new systems that automate chunks of the "kill chain," from navigation to target recognition to terminal attack.
The Bumblebee—built by a hush-hush venture backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt—is one of the most advanced: It can be pointed at a target, cut off from its pilot, and still dive in and hit, even through heavy Russian signal-jamming. Bumblebee is hardly alone. Ukrainian startups like NORDA Dynamics sell bolted-on AI modules that let cheap first-person-view drones lock onto a visual target and finish the strike autonomously when radio links die. Sine Engineering's Pasika lets a single operator manage dozens of drones at once. Other firms are building long-range systems that navigate without GPS, using computer vision to pick out specific targets—oil tanks, air-defense radars, and even (potentially) individuals.
Russia, for its part, is also deploying AI-enhanced drones and studying downed Ukrainian gear with growing alarm. Developers and soldiers are blunt about the trade-offs. The new weapons are still brittle, have short battery lives, and are often less precise than a skilled human pilot. Many retain a human "in the loop," at least to designate the target. But some systems, their creators acknowledge, can already attack soldiers without human input. "I think we created the monster, and I'm not sure where it's going to go," one developer warns. Critics caution that allowing machines to autonomously choose human targets crosses a "moral line," eroding civilian protections.
Kyiv's techies and foreign backers see AI drones as essential to stopping a larger Russian military now, noting how "unbelievably unprepared" Western militaries are, including the United States. Schmidt casts his role as humanitarian, arguing AI weapons might someday make large ground invasions a thing of the past. History is less reassuring: When Richard Gatling pitched his rapid-fire gun in the late 19th century, he, too, suggested it would make huge armies, and thus war itself, obsolete. Forbes takes a look at drone evolution in Ukraine during its nearly four-year-old war. The Guardian remains wary of what AI-driven drones mean for the world at large.
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