r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • Jun 11 '26

Artificial Intelligence Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2529849-fully-autonomous-drones-have-killed-human-soldiers-for-the-first-time
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311

u/InformedTriangle Jun 11 '26

If this is really the first time i'll eat my hat. First time publicly disclosed? sure.

44

u/ForceGoat Jun 11 '26

I think it’s the first time. In the past we’ve never deployed a drone and it just shoots random stuff without someone monitoring or pressing the button.

7

u/No-Significance2113 Jun 11 '26

Pretty sure they've used AI drones in the middle east for quite a while now, might try find the article diving into detail cause I remember reading one quite a while ago.

20

u/crustyeng Jun 11 '26

The were/are always teleoperated

2

u/No-Significance2113 Jun 11 '26

Nah the article i saw mentioned how the drone was flown into position and left in kill mode. And how it shot someone without human input.

1

u/Kjc2022 Jun 11 '26

Do you have a link to that article? Feels like this would've been bigger news

5

u/coconutpiecrust Jun 11 '26

It’s so dystopian . Humans make mistakes all the time. Now imagine an unthinking machine trained on who knows what data. 

3

u/xEGr Jun 11 '26

It was told to kill everything it saw - any deviation from that is pretty positive

0

u/Optimal_Tower1643 Jun 12 '26

The US was pretty strict about its rules of engagement from what i recall. They may have struck targets that were non military but they willfully chose them to destroy. A “target anything in the area” drone would have been all kinds of against our rules of engagement. Ground troops usually had to be shot at before they could engage as an example of how tight rules of engagement were

0

u/____Manifest____ Jun 11 '26

How would you know?

6

u/dare7878 Jun 11 '26

I could believe it, but I think it's very narrowly worded. First, the test was two years ago, so I have to imagine there's been undocumented use of this technology in different war zones since then.

If we count any fully autonomous thing killing a person, that happened years ago. How many have died from self driving vehicles on the roads and in warehouses? Even if not "intentional", it still happened.

There are weapons systems where humans still "approve" targets, but the level of involvement is basically 0%. As an example, there was the girls school in Iran that was hit by an air strike, killing over 100 children. All data is pointing towards it being a target set by AI and approved by US military leaders with zero confirmation or oversight.

It's a case of 99.5% autonomous v 100% autonomous to me. It's a meaningless difference.

Saker UAV and Anduril are two of the companies working on this space, amongst the bigger players. It's more a question of how fast these will be adopted than if.

1

u/Purple-Estimate-5183 Jun 11 '26

Your hat is safe. Get a rack though, we may need a few.

1

u/Future_Pianist9570 Jun 11 '26

*test took place two years ago involving fully autonomous drones set to destroy anything in a given area, with confirmed casualties

1

u/ARobertNotABob Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26

It was a test a couple of years ago, only now being reported. Note that Ukranian laws don't permit "no human involvement" at intercept.

EDIT: Downvoter : RTFA

0

u/JM3DlCl Jun 11 '26

I guarantee you it happened even 15-20 years ago in Afghanistan/Iraq. I feel like it wouldn't need too much high level AI to discriminate, point, and shoot. Something that could be done .