Russia-Ukraine war is accelerating the dangerous race toward fully autonomous drones

Both Russia and Ukraine have moved from remote-piloted drones toward machines with AI-assisted targeting, driven by the need to beat jamming and communications blackouts on the battlefield. Ukrainian forces used an AI-guided drone to strike a tank after losing its link to the operator, while recovered Russian V2U drones show onboard Nvidia computers and, in later versions, no external communications hardware at all, suggesting they can select and engage targets without anyone watching.

A July strike on a Zaporizhzhia gas station, which killed three Ukrainian civilians, involved a human choosing the target area while software picked the exact aim point. Ukraine says it has used fully autonomous drones in Crimea strikes but has not mass-produced them, and earlier reports of autonomous quadcopters near Bakhmut are complicated by evidence the machines may have simply been preprogrammed.

The appeal for both militaries is obvious: fewer people needed, more resistance to jamming, better tracking of moving targets. The risk, which the reporting is blunt about, is that neither country's ability to keep a human in the loop is keeping pace with how fast the technology is moving.

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