Ukraine Eyes AI as Weapon Against Russia, Ushering in Age of Killer Robots

In a field on the outskirts of Kyiv, the founders of Vyriy, a Ukrainian drone company, were recently at work on a weapon of the future. To demonstrate it, Oleksii Babenko, 25, Vyriy's CEO, hopped on his motorcycle and rode down a dirt path. Behind him, a drone followed, as a colleague tracked the movements from a briefcase-size computer. Until recently, a human would have piloted the quadcopter.

No longer. Instead, after the drone locked onto its target - Babenko - it flew itself, guided by software that used the machine's camera to track him. The motorcycle's growling engine was no match for the silent drone as it stalked Babenko. If the drone had been armed with explosives, and if his colleagues hadn't disengaged the autonomous tracking, Babenko would have been a goner.

Vyriy is just one of many Ukrainian companies working on a major leap forward in the weaponisation of consumer technology, driven by the war with Russia. The pressure to outthink the enemy, along with huge flows of investment, donations and govt contracts, has turned Ukraine into a Silicon Valley for autonomous drones and other weaponry.

What the companies are creating is that makes human judgment about targeting and firing increasingly tangential. The widespread availability of off-the-shelf devices, easy-to-design software, powerful automation algorithms and specialised artificial intelligence microchips has pushed a deadly innovation race into uncharted territory, fuelling a potential new era of killer robots.

The most advanced versions of the technology that allows drones and other machines to act autonomously have been made possible by deep learning, a form of AI that uses large amounts of data to identify patterns and make decisions. Deep learning has helped generate popular large language models, like OpenAI's GPT-4, but it also helps make models interpret and respond in real time to video and camera footage.

That means software that once helped a drone follow a snowboarder down a mountain can now become a deadly tool. In more than a dozen interviews with Ukrainian entrepreneurs, engineers and military units, a picture emerged of a near future when swarms of self-guided drones can coordinate attacks and machine guns with computer vision can automatically shoot down soldiers. More outlandish creations, like a hovering unmanned copter that wields machine guns, are also being developed.

For Ukraine, the technologies could provide an edge against Russia, which is also developing autonomous killer gadgets. The systems raise the stakes in an international debate about the ethical and legal ramifications of AI on the battlefield. Human rights groups and UN officials want to limit 18 its use for fear that they may trigger a new global arms race that could spiral out of control. In Ukraine, such concerns are secondary to fighting off an invader. "We need maximum automation," said Mykhailo Fedorov, minister of digital transformation, who has led Ukraine's efforts to use tech startups to expand advanced fighting capabilities. "These technologies are fundamental to our victory."