How AI drones have fizzled in Ukraine (so far)

Last year, both Russia and Ukraine boasted of fielding drones that tracked targets using AI algorithms. Now new expert analysis suggests that neither side managed to get this to work well enough for war but the US and China might.

“The war in Ukraine is spurring a revolution in drone warfare using AI,” blared a Washington Post headline last July. Then, in the fall, a flurry of reports said that both Russia and Ukraine had deployed small drones that used artificial intelligence to identify and home in on targets. Having on-board AI meant that the drones, versions of the Russian Lancet and the Ukrainian Saker Scout, would not need a human operator to guide them all the way to impact.

If this AI had proved itself in battle, it really would have been a revolution. Electronic warfare systems designed to disrupt the operator’s control link or worse, trace the transmission to its source for a precision strike would have been largely useless against self-guided drones.

Skilled and scarce drone jockeys could have been replaced by thousands of conscripts quickly trained to point-and-click on potential targets and instead of every drone requiring an operator staring at its video feed full-time, a single human could have overseen a swarm of lethal machines.

All told, military AI would have taken a technically impressive and slightly terrifying step towards independence from human control, like Marvel’s Ultron singing Pinocchio’s “I have no strings on me.” Instead, after more than four months of frontline field-testing, neither sides’ AI-augmented drones seem to have made a measurable impact.

In early February, a detailed report from the Center for a New American Security dismissed the AI drones in a few lines. “The Lancet-3 was advertised as having autonomous target identification and engagement, although these claims are unverified,” wrote CNAS’s defence programme director, Stacie Pettyjohn. “Both parties claim to be using artificial intelligence to improve the drone’s ability to hit its target, but likely its use is limited.”