Ukrainian firms deploy AI drones that guide themselves to targets

KYIV, Ukraine, Oct. 29, In a field outside Kyiv, a drone flew toward a dilapidated car on a dirt road. The pilot released the control stick. The machine guided itself to the target using onboard artificial intelligence.

Yaroslav Azhnyuk, 37, runs The Fourth Law and Odd Systems. These two defense firms produce the Lupynis-10-TFL-1, an autonomous drone used by dozens of Ukrainian military units. Azhnyuk previously worked in Silicon Valley and founded Petcube, a company that sold one million smartphone-powered pet cameras.

Azhnyuk says he pivoted to defense after Russia's 2022 invasion. "I was like, OK, I've got to move on from Petcube and do something to protect my country," he said. "And so now we're making not cameras that fling treats but cameras that fling explosives at people who came to occupy our land."

The Lupynis-10-TFL-1 combines a small first-person-view drone with a guidance unit. An onboard computer takes over during the last 500 meters of flight. The system uses deep-learning neural networks trained on hours of combat footage to recognize vehicles, tanks, and flying objects.

Stab, the head of the test and integration team, described the hardware during a test. "So you see here is our camera, plus the microcomputer inside this 3-D model," Stab said. "All of the mind is here."

Russia is also deploying AI-enabled drones. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned that AI could lead battlefield decisions as soon as next year. Azhnyuk acknowledged the speed of the technology. "Their systems are capable of making decisions in microseconds, and human control takes minutes, hours and sometimes days," he said.

The company names its weapons after Ukrainian intellectuals. The Lupynis drone honors Anatoliy Lupynis, a 20th-century poet and activist who endured Soviet imprisonment. "It is important for us to help to resurrect those people," Azhnyuk said. "Their ideas are still with us. And now they're fighting back."

Azhnyuk said safeguards ensure humans select the target. "If we refuse to use AI in decision-making in a defensive scenario, we've lost, right?" he asked. "If Ukraine loses, there's no way for us to argue about the ethics of AI."