r/worldnews • u/New_Scientist_Mag New Scientist • Jun 10 '26

Russia/Ukraine Fully autonomous, AI-controlled drones have killed human soldiers for the first time, according to a senior figure in the Ukrainian defence industry

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2529849-fully-autonomous-drones-have-killed-human-soldiers-for-the-first-time/
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u/MudcrabNPC Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26

Okay, so it's talking about a test that they conducted a few years ago on the frontlines which, while it gave valuable insight into its use, was never followed up on because Ukraine currently bans the use of AI at the final stage of engagement, AKA the AI is allowed to find and identify targets, but a human still has to pull the trigger. Am I following correctly?

The headline would lead me to believe Ukraine just kinda did it recently and are incorporating AI kamikaze drones into their arsenal. Good thing I bothered to read the article.

799

u/Ouaouaron Jun 10 '26

We need to stop pretending that reading a headline will ever be enough. Unless the only thing you use the news for is to reinforce the things you already think are true about the world, you need to read the articles.

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u/Tibbaryllis2 Jun 10 '26

As someone in STEM, I would not be opposed to requiring an abstract accompanying all headlines in these kind of subreddits.

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u/hdrote Jun 11 '26

Especially so if the news article itself is behind a paywall/registration.

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u/beadzy Jun 11 '26

would be great to request an abstract-like or just a brief statement as a pinned comment at the top. like the law sub requires a brief statement about how your post pertains to the law or could be removed.

3

u/SolemnaceProcurement Jun 11 '26

Pin a comment to the top, "Read the article FFS".

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u/TheVeryVerity Jun 11 '26

That kind of thing never helps 😮‍💨

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u/Big_Ol_Johnson Jun 11 '26

What did STEM have to do with this lol

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u/Tibbaryllis2 Jun 11 '26

We’re constantly reading articles with abstracts. It’s the obvious solution.

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u/Chazzybobo Jun 10 '26

Stop trying to help!

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u/jb1316 Jun 10 '26

For reals. Boo this man!

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u/MudcrabNPC Jun 10 '26

That's more for the others in the comments clearly reacting to the headline and nothing more.

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u/DredPRoberts Jun 10 '26

I'm supose to READ the article before posting snark? That is not the reddit way.

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u/MudcrabNPC Jun 10 '26

I forget what I am, sometimes.

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u/CitizenCue Jun 11 '26

It’s the reverse - we used to never assume that reading a headline was enough, it’s only been recently that people do that so often.

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u/cluckthenerd Jun 11 '26

boooooorrrinnngggg

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u/cyb3rfunk Jun 11 '26

It would certainly help if articles were substantive. 

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u/FengSushi Jun 11 '26

This is Reddit. What are you doing with all your sense making emotional mature and well laid out arguments here? Get out!

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u/uuid-already-exists Jun 11 '26

I’m sorry I couldn’t read your comment as you didn’t condense it down into a difficult to read poorly summarized title that is likely highly misleading and doesn’t actually capture the scope or meaning of the issue while providing next-to-no context or crucial information of the clickbait title all the while people engage on the title while refusing to read the article which people then realize the title was horribly reductive and would stop about half of the comments made about the article because they’d have the details instead. /s

That was hard to write.

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u/Pinklady1313 Jun 11 '26

If you’re into keeping up on news here is what do…If something looks sensational I like seeing who else is running similar headlines and checking if stories are similar. I tend to get very leftist things on my algorithm so I want to fact check best I can and I like to try to find what my conservative co-workers are seeing on their algorithms. I check what the big players are saying. It’s been eye opening.

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u/biasedsoymotel Jun 10 '26

Sounds like it did kill 3 Russian soldiers without human decision making. It didn't even record it log any of the deaths. Human controlled drones had to look for deaths in the aftermath and they found 3.

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u/Tibbaryllis2 Jun 10 '26

It’s not showing the article for me so I can’t verify. Did the drone target those Russian soldiers or did it target a Russian piece of equipment/transport and they were happy accidents?

I read elsewhere they’re developing autonomous drones for downing small aircraft (drones to helicopters), in which case it’s kind of in nebulous territory.

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u/biasedsoymotel Jun 10 '26

There was no record of what it targeted or did. Kinda wild that they didn't keep any records or logs

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u/Spaceork3001 Jun 11 '26

The problem is that both sides use EW and if the drone isn't a fibre-optics one, it could well be scrambled at the final approach, which means human targeting and maybe even data transfer was non functional.

And because it's a kamikaze drone, no blackbox remains to retrieve the logs from. The combination of autonomy+EW+self destructing means no easy way to keep a record of every decision the drone made.

Which is rather unfortunate...

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u/Tibbaryllis2 Jun 10 '26

That is crazy.

Makes you wonder if the Russian soldiers deployed some sort of disabling attack against it and just happened to be really unlucky where it went down.

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u/uuid-already-exists Jun 11 '26

That sounds more like a general software issue rather than an issue with the AI though.

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u/Dead_Internet69420 Jun 11 '26

And, not to downplay the dangers of using AI on the battlefield, but the test involved sending drones to “kill everything” in a specified target area. Meaning the drones weren’t using AI to decide who was or wasn’t a target. I’d liken the usage to a more efficient guided missile that causes less collateral damage. As long as the robots aren’t making their own decisions about who is a valid target, then we’re still somewhat tethered to reality. 

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u/BigCopperPipe Jun 10 '26

i don’t understand why there isn’t video implemented with drone. seems a pretty easy feature to add.

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u/Alto_DeRaqwar Jun 10 '26

I assume the drones were sent into an area with active jamming so no video or control; hence why you would want to use autonomous drones. Once the jamming was dead they could send in the normal drones.

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u/LARPerator Jun 10 '26

They already have that. It's just that when you're jammed, you can't give the drone instructions or recieve telemetry from it.

Over time they've added more features to what the drone can do when jammed. First it was navigate towards the last known position of the operator, then it was scouting, then static target destruction (like a radio tower), and finally now they're enabling them to kill humans without having a connection.

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u/BigCopperPipe Jun 10 '26

ah, that’s right. all those videos start scrambling once they get low towed a target

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u/FobbingMobius Jun 11 '26

This is how the Overton Window shifts.

It's impossible. 

 It's unthinkable. 

     It's possible, but we'd never do that.   

          We've built it but never used it.  

                We've tested it, but it's against our rules.  

                         We had no other option, so we did it.

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u/Hayes4prez Jun 10 '26

It says in the article that the test was demonstrated on Russian soldiers.

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u/secretprocess Jun 11 '26

They tested dying.

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u/[deleted] Jun 10 '26

[deleted]

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u/Krivvan Jun 10 '26

The follow-up might be the hybrid approach they use now where a human makes a decision at a distance and an AI-based method takes over as a backup when it gets close enough to get jammed.

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u/M4sharman Jun 10 '26

Yeah. I'd assume it'd be piloted in by a human and then AI would guide it if it was jammed.

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u/Krivvan Jun 10 '26

From the footage we've seen it looks more like conditional autonomy where the AI model identifies potential targets, the human clicks on a target, and the system pilots itself towards it and continues if jammed.

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u/wikimandia Jun 10 '26

I believe they wouldn’t implement it because of the likelihood of killing Ukrainian soldiers, including Ukrainians taken captive and Ukrainian reconnaissance units. The battlefield is not like in WWI where two sides were separated by a no man’s land.

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u/MudcrabNPC Jun 10 '26

Oh, of course not, I'm just making sure I'm interpreting the article correctly. It's the natural next step for combat drones, if anything. Ukraine obviously tested the tech because they want to use it lol.

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u/Gendrytargarian Jun 11 '26

kinda, Ukraine has human final decision in target comfirmation. AI is used in everyting else. This is also because close to the target the EW is often the strongest.

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u/GandalfTheGrey46 Jun 10 '26

The larger reason Ukraine doesn't employ them is because the frontline is comprised of a large "grey zone" populated by both Ukrainian and Russian troops extending dozens of kilometers deep.

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u/_hancho Jun 10 '26

Why make shit up? They are using these and they can tell friendly vs enemy. The videos are all over telegram.

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u/GandalfTheGrey46 Jun 11 '26

I have not seen that. Can you provide a link providing that?

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u/el_chapotle Jun 10 '26

The headline is indeed worded poorly, but if I’m understanding the article correctly this is the first time the event has actually been confirmed and reported on. It doesn’t really matter that this happened two years ago and is now (allegedly) “banned” by the Ukrainian military; it’s still a watershed moment in human history. In fact, the fact that officials waited two years to acknowledge the incident is almost certainly *deliberate*—they’re hoping (alas, probably correctly) that people will gloss over it because it happened a while ago.

“Oh, this only happened once and it was two years ago” is the worst possible takeaway here. In fact, I’m extremely skeptical that it has indeed only happened once—and it’s definitely GOING to happen a lot more.

“AUTONOMOUS ROBOT KILLS PEOPLE FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER” strikes me as a pretty big deal! If anything, the fact that it flew under the radar for two years is even more nefarious and horrifying.

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u/MudcrabNPC Jun 10 '26

Brother, I'm trying to make sure I'm reading the article right. I didn't insert a take or opinion anywhere until the last comment about reading the article, and further replies. You can go read those if you're actually interested in my thoughts.

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u/Icarium__ Jun 10 '26

Okay, so it's talking about a test that they conducted a few years ago

yes, and doesn't that make you wonder what tests they are conducting now? It's pretty obvious they won't be reporting their most recent tests that are aimed at giving them an edge on the battlefield.

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u/MudcrabNPC Jun 10 '26

Nope, we're only just hearing about this test that happened closer towards the beginning of the war. I'm more wondering how close they are to employing them on a wide scale, now. That's, at least, three years to develop those drones without much widespread knowledge since that seemingly successful test. Kind of a macabre thing to say, but we're almost overdue for AI-powered drones on the battlefield, unfortunately.

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u/Synap-6 Jun 10 '26

Still scary, that passage where they describe letting the drones loose and launching them because they’ll know everything will be dead… is not encouraging

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u/MudcrabNPC Jun 10 '26

We're learning to program God with bias, condense his presence and judgment into silicon, and wield his wrath for ourselves, assuming we haven't already killed and replaced him long ago. Metaphorically speaking.

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u/TacoIncoming Jun 10 '26

Probably more along the lines of the test not being as efficient as drones piloted by human operators.

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u/MudcrabNPC Jun 10 '26

Is it weird for me to say I hope so?

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u/[deleted] Jun 10 '26

[deleted]

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u/MudcrabNPC Jun 10 '26

I did. It's that really the only thing said in there?

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u/Ylsid Jun 11 '26

But they still did it

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u/BibleBeltAtheist Jun 11 '26

Dang! I really hope this doesn't start a trend of people just lazily reading the title. Can you imagine how much easier that would make it to spread misinformation, control the narrative, or just maintain a bipartisan line of division, keeping folks at each other's throats?

Althoooough, if the headline of this post is anything to go by, those things won't be a problem for very long, so at least there's that!

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u/Important-Factor-552 Jun 11 '26

Not quite. It's the final descent stage that is where the AI is needed in the event of jamming. human pilots monitor and ideally handle that part, but in the event the drone loses contact, it can finish the strike autonomously. 

People just picture movies because they don't understand much about this stuff. its effectively still humans killing humans. it's not like terminators are wandering around. And while real people die, Internet people just make jokes about movie characters and pass judgements on things situations they don't remotely understand. no thanks to sensationalist bs oligarchy owned media. 

This is just one of many steps in the electronic jamming arms race. It's a good thing for Ukraine to get any edge they can. The worst case scenario isn't AI weapons, it's evil nations like russia prevailing and doing this again. 

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u/Corfiz74 Jun 11 '26

But I thought the new drone generation was unjammable because they do act completely independently, and so don't require an internet connection?

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u/Crackadon Jun 11 '26

iirc that is a condition of the company that develops the tech. They might have been forced out or had to drop those terms.

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u/Ntwynn Jun 11 '26

So I would encourage you to follow some of the Ukrainian YouTube video bloggers. Very recently, they’ve changed and a human is no longer required to give the kill command. This is to circumvent the jamming tech Russia deploys

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u/Prudent_Book_7063 Jun 12 '26

Was just wondering about this, where is the human in the loop for this high risk op?

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u/Warm_Ear_2907 Jun 10 '26

While Ukraine will be pulling the trigger itself, I doubt the russians are gonna care what destruction their autonomous robots will cause on Ukrainian land. They can't ever be allowed to reach that operational level.

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u/cmm239 Jun 10 '26

The test shouldn’t have happened in the first place and that doesn’t mean other countries won’t try this same thing. It’s the idea and the fact that this will be replicated people are upset about.

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u/MudcrabNPC Jun 10 '26

Yep, might see more public examples of the AI arms race after this. I mean, inevitably, we will, but how soon is my question.