For years, the idea of a fully autonomous weapon system killing a human being on the battlefield existed as a warning, a thought experiment, and an unconfirmed rumor. It is no longer any of those things.<\/p>\n
A Ukrainian drone manufacturer has confirmed to New Scientist<\/a> that a test involving 10 fully autonomous AI-controlled drones \u2014 operating with no human oversight or connection \u2014 killed Russian soldiers on the front line of the Ukraine war approximately two years ago.<\/p>\n The disclosure, made at a press event hosted by the Ukrainian embassy, marks what weapons experts are calling a historic threshold in the history of warfare.<\/p>\n “Everything it sees will be killed”<\/p>\n The drone-maker behind the technology, Alexander Kokhanovskyy, described the operation in blunt terms. The drones were launched toward the front line near the cities of Bakhmut and Chasiv Yar during a Ukrainian counteroffensive push, programmed to cover between three kilometers (1.86 miles) and five kilometers (3.10 miles) over approximately 10 minutes, at which point they entered what Kokhanovskyy called “Terminator mode<\/a>” \u2014 a state in which an onboard AI model independently searched for, identified, and attacked targets with no human input.<\/p>\n “We just launch it, and we know everything will be dead \u2014 everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” Kokhanovskyy told New Scientist. “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing. Everything it sees will be killed.”<\/p>\n Because the autonomous drones transmitted no live footage during the mission, there was no way to monitor them in real time. After the test concluded, human-piloted drones were sent into the area to manually survey results. What they found: “a couple of soldiers, one truck.”<\/p>\n Kokhanovskyy was not personally present at the test, which was carried out by an unnamed military unit<\/a>. He was clear that it remained a one-off experiment and was never expanded into wider deployment. “It’s a test. We never implemented it more widely,” he said.<\/p>\n What makes this different from every prior incident<\/p>\n