“The era of autonomous warfare will not be announced by robotic armies marching across battlefields. Instead, it is already emerging, silently and inexorably, in the skies and fields of eastern Ukraine (and to a lesser extent in the Middle East),” warned last March in an article in Foreign Affairs magazine, former CIA director David Petraeus and expert Isaac Flanagan.
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And as they pointed out, it is already happening. The New York Times reported that last month, a small Russian drone resembling a toy airplane crashed from the sky over Zaporizhzhia, in southeastern Ukraine. While attempting to head toward a gas station, it crashed into a wall and exploded in a shower of shrapnel, killing three people.
The newspaper spoke with drone experts, Ukrainian military commanders, and the forensic team that examined the remains of the deadly attack and others that occurred in the city, who indicated that the drone that killed them was guided by an experimental artificial intelligence system, not by a human pilot.
Experts and military officials told the Times that the drone was programmed by human operators to head toward a particular gas station, but once it approached, it chose its exact target—most likely propane tanks—on its own, based on its training to recognize such tanks and attack them.
“This is a long-anticipated event in the war in Ukraine, heralding a dystopian future in which killer robots roam the skies making life-or-death decisions that reduce targets to mere data,” the newspaper added.
According to experts and military officials consulted by the newspaper, analysis of the remains of this attack and others in Zaporizhzhia revealed that the drones had integrated minicomputers, marketed by Nvidia, that made decisions about their targets. Nvidia produces most of the chips that power the world’s most advanced AI systems.
The presence of Nvidia modules and the lack of antennas on the drones led Ukrainian air defense commanders to assume that the weapons were guided by an autonomous AI system, which was confirmed after a subsequent investigation.
The New York Times indicated that autonomous AI systems can be trained with thousands of images to recognize categories such as “river,” “military truck,” or “person.” “Self-guided drones use their cameras to search for these elements with greater precision than a human pilot can offer. However, opponents of this type of weapon argue that, without human intervention, drones may be more prone to errors or violations of the laws of war, such as failing to distinguish between innocent civilians and combatants,” it added.
“Both Kyiv and Moscow have pushed autonomy to the limit due to the omnipresence of electronic warfare and air defenses in the operational environment. No commander can rely on continuous human control,” wrote Petraeus and Flanagan.
In a Ukrainian assault against Russian forces near Kharkiv in December 2024, the 13th Brigade of the Ukrainian National Guard launched what was reported as the first offensive operation carried out entirely with unmanned systems. Instead of deploying soldiers on the ground, remotely controlled ground vehicles advanced to place and clear mines and fire on Russian defenses, while surveillance, bomber, and suicide drones provided battlefield awareness and air support.
The attack destroyed Russian defensive positions and ultimately allowed Ukrainian infantry to advance and take the terrain they still control. No soldier was exposed during the initial assault, and thanks to meticulous planning and disciplined communications, no autonomous system was lost due to Russian interference.
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Although impressive, this coordination was still controlled by humans. Pilots, located in different places, watched shared video transmissions and manually sequenced their actions; the systems did not communicate with each other.
In the case of the attack on the gas station in Zaporizhzhia, it would be the first documented case in which civilian deaths were caused by a Russian drone equipped with such a system, said Kateryna Bondar, lead researcher at the Wadhwani AI Center of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. She added that the Nvidia module “is the best evidence” that Russia was experimenting with autonomous AI.
Petraeus and Flanagan noted in their article that very soon autonomous systems will stop operating individually. Over time, they will form units the size of platoons or even battalions that will share information and coordinate without human intervention. And whoever waits for human approval before acting will lose.
“This poses a risk to the entire world,” Colonel Serhiy Minaiev, commander of Zaporizhzhia’s air defenses, told The New York Times. “In a few years, we will live in a ‘Terminator’ movie. This is no joke. Machines are making decisions to attack,” he added.
“Launch autonomy implies systems that adapt their execution within the limitations set by the commander: coordinating with other elements of the formation, responding to changing conditions, and selecting among authorized actions when disconnected from human control, although humans will oversee their progress and retain the ability to reassign tasks or abort the mission as long as communications remain open,” Petraeus and Flanagan indicated.
“Currently, launch autonomy is in an early stage. Thousands of individual drones equipped with AI-assisted targeting systems—capable of locating and attacking targets without continuous operator supervision—are among the millions of remotely controlled systems,” they detail.
And they add: “However, over time, these machines will not operate as independent units. Instead, commanders will group them into formations: aerial, ground, and maritime systems that include drones, sensors, and targeting elements that direct and coordinate movement and attacks. These formations will execute the commander’s intent and preprogrammed instructions even when disconnected.”
According to Ukrainian officials consulted by The New York Times, the Nvidia chip used in the Zaporizhzhia attack was not encrypted, so they were able to see the terrain images that had been loaded into the module, allowing the drone to track visual landmarks and maintain its trajectory. They were also able to examine the code, which revealed the types of targets the drone had been trained to recognize and attack, such as propane tanks.
Early drone models were usually piloted by human operators via radio transmissions or fiber optic cables, or were preprogrammed with coordinates. With the arrival of drones on the battlefield in Ukraine, their pilots have become priority targets.
