Ukraine's AI Drone Gamble

With machine vision, the objective is for the drone to find its way independently to its target, having learned to distinguish where it is in a given terrain.

"The main goal is to sever the dependence on communication between the drone and the operator, and the drone with a satellite for navigation," Samuel Bendett of the U.S. think tank CNA told Newsweek.

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"The main goal is to sever the dependence on communication between the drone and the operator, and the drone with a satellite for navigation," Samuel Bendett of the U.S. think tank CNA told Newsweek.

Using a drone that can strike a target without any guidance from an operator, completing a mission even with jamming, has obvious battlefield advantages when counter-drone technology is everywhere.

"There are even systems that can look at the ground beneath and puzzle out where it is, to sidestep GPS jamming," U.K.-based drone expert Steve Wright told Newsweek.

With the pressures of war, Kyiv and Moscow are hoping to integrate new, experimental AI in much shorter time frames than many countries in the West have to develop and discuss the technology.

In Ukraine, it is "used rapidly and without significant obstacles or guardrails in order to quickly gain advantage over the adversary," Bendett said.

With AI, it is impossible to be totally sure that the computer will not "do something completely unexpected and unsafe," Wright said. "In the West, we are spending huge efforts wrestling with that problem, but of course the Ukrainians do not have that luxury."

Russia, too, has said it is putting AI into its drones. Moscow's military, along with volunteer groups, is developing AI "in contrast to the United States' cautious and responsible, if under-resourced, approach," Bendett and analyst Jane Pinelis wrote in a commentary piece for the War on the Rocks website in January.

Both Russia and Ukraine will "attempt to copy each other's AI successes in the shortest time possible, and this AI race is the current tip of the spear in the global AI tech race," Bendett said.

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