Humanity has officially passed a grim milestone: the first confirmed death at the hands of a fully-autonomous robot weapon.
In a remarkable interview with the New Scientist, a senior figure involved in the Ukrainian defence industry admitted that a fully autonomous drone deployed to the front lines of the Russo-Ukranian war has claimed human lives.
The event has been kept under wraps for two years, Ukrainian drone maker Alexander Kokhanovskyy said. The device itself was a quadcopter drone designed to zip to the front line, loiter around a perimeter for roughly 10 minutes, then launch into “terminator mode.” This mode, the Ukranian drone expert explained, involves the use of an unidentified AI model to automatically seek out and attack human targets.
During the operation in question — which Kokhanovskyy likened to a “test” — the quadcopter was let loose by Ukranian soldiers, where it identified and ultimately attacked “a couple of [Russian] soldiers” and “one truck.” The attack was confirmed afterward, by a human-piloted drone sent to scan the impact-zone.
“We just launch it and we know everything will be dead — everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” Kokhanovskyy told NewSci. “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… everything it sees will be killed.”
While this marks the first known strike of its kind, it’s fair to say the world’s militaries have been inching toward this for a while. The Israeli Defence Forces, for example, have long deployed loitering suicide drones to hover over various demarcation zones across Palestine, though it’s always been claimed that these drones relied on human operators to ultimately pull the trigger.
More recently, US military operatives used Anthropic’s Claude to select bombing targets across Iran. Though officials argue that a human operator was in the loop, use of this system is nonetheless thought to have played a role in the brutal destruction of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girl’s school, an attack which killed 168 children, teachers, and school staff.
Where we go from here is anybody’s guess, but if Kokhanovskyy is to be believed, humanity has crossed a threshold that can never be uncrossed.
More on warfare: Pentagon Refuses to Say If AI Was Used to Select Elementary School as Bombing Target