Introduction
Fully autonomous drones killed Russian soldiers during a battlefield test two years ago, according to Ukrainian drone manufacturer Alexander Kokhanovskyy. If verified, the incident would represent a significant milestone in a war that has spurred unprecedented developments in military drones, robots, and AI-guided weaponry.
The one-time test was revealed by Kokhanovskyy—CEO of the Ukrainian drone maker Aero Center—during an interview with New Scientist at a press event hosted by the Ukrainian embassy in London. Kokhanovskyy described a test that did not involve his current company Aero Center, using quadcopter drones that were preprogrammed to fly to a front-line area before activating an AI-powered "Terminator mode" that would seek out and attack any target in the given area.
The "Terminator" Test: What Happened
There was apparently no video feed or anything else to show what the "Terminator" drones targeted and attacked. Kokhanovskyy told New Scientist that human-piloted drones sent to check out the aftermath found "a couple" of dead Russian soldiers, leading to the conclusion that the fully autonomous drones had killed them.
The demonstration raised immediate questions about compliance with international humanitarian law. Defence company representatives at the Ukrainian embassy event said that the Ukrainian government bans the use of AI in the final stage of target interception, according to New Scientist. A Ukrainian military commander also told New Scientist that his drone pilots only use semi-autonomous systems that always have humans making crucial control decisions. He described Ukraine's commitment to "international humanitarian law" while emphasizing that the military always exercises "great care in decision-making in order to prevent civilian casualties."
The one-time nature of this experiment makes sense when considering the practical limitations of the approach, along with considerations regarding international humanitarian law. Sending fully autonomous drones to attack anything and everything in a given area without any human operator intervention requires careful preplanning and carries the risk of so-called "friendly fire" incidents or attacks on civilian noncombatants. It is also unclear how effective these fully autonomous quadcopter drones were in selecting and attacking targets compared to human drone pilots.
Legal and Ethical Considerations
There is currently no commonly agreed definition of what constitutes a lethal autonomous weapon system, according to the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs. But common characterizations describe weapon systems with the autonomy to "perform their functions in the absence of direction or input from a human actor." The US Department of Defense has defined lethal autonomous weapons as "weapon system[s] that, once activated, can select and engage targets without further intervention by a human operator."
The UN's position highlights the legal ambiguity surrounding autonomous weapons. While many nations acknowledge the potential benefits of AI in military applications—such as faster decision-making and reduced risk to human operators—they also express serious concerns about accountability, proportionality, and the ability to ensure compliance with international humanitarian law. For deeper analysis of AI policy and ethics in military contexts, see our coverage of AI Policy & Ethics.
The Role of Autonomous AI in Drone Arsenals
Fully autonomous weapons with the capability to "accomplish goals independently or with minimal supervision in complex and unpredictable environments" are not yet a battlefield reality in the war in Ukraine, according to Kateryna Bondar, a former advisor to the government of Ukraine, in her report for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank in Washington, DC.
But Bondar highlighted a growing number of drones integrating certain autonomous capabilities for navigation and sometimes targeting, even if human operators maintain overall control. Ukraine and Russia are both fielding many FPV (first-person view) drones for scouting and striking vehicles and even individual soldiers. These are typically controlled by trained drone pilots who wear virtual-reality goggles to see from the drone's point of view while aiming for enemy targets.
There are also larger quadcopter or multirotor "bomber" drones that can carry heavier payloads for either supply runs or for dropping explosives on enemy targets at the front lines. Longer-range strike drones that resemble fixed-wing aircraft may incorporate more autonomous decision-making capabilities. For related coverage on robotics in defense applications, see our Robotics category.
The Shahed Drone Threat and Autonomous Defense
In 2025, Russia launched hundreds of drones to attack Ukrainian cities each night, including Shahed drones originally provided by Iran and increasingly manufactured in Russia. Shahed drones are typically preprogrammed to fly automatically toward their targets with little autonomous decision-making capability. But some Shahed drone variants, such as the Geran-2, are equipped with smuggled Nvidia Jetson Orin microcomputers that provide onboard video processing and autonomous decision-making capabilities, including autonomous target recognition and retargeting.
To defend against those attacks by Russian Shahed drones, Ukraine has deployed low- and high-tech air defense systems that include homegrown, inexpensive interceptor drones. Some interceptor drone systems are designed to autonomously fly to the intercept point and lock onto targets—although a human operator is still required to perform initial target selection and initiate strike commands while always retaining the ability to cancel attacks, according to the Ukrainian government platform United 24. For technical details on how autonomous systems interact with cybersecurity considerations, see our Cybersecurity category.
AI-Enhanced Navigation and Targeting
Meanwhile, Ukraine has gained the technological and manufacturing capability to launch more than 5,000 drone strikes against Russian targets at ranges exceeding 20 kilometers every month, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. These mid- and long-range strike drones necessarily rely heavily on autonomous navigation capabilities because of Russian electronic warfare systems that can interfere with human operator communication links, along with GPS jamming that can throw off GPS-guided weapons.
Such AI-driven navigation has boosted the success rate of Ukrainian drone strikes from around 10 to 20 percent to 70 to 80 percent, Bondar wrote in her CSIS report. Ukraine's defense industry has focused on training small AI models on small datasets to run on the limited computing power of small and inexpensive chips. That approach has created AI-driven software for crucial autonomous functions—including navigation and target recognition—that can be packaged with standalone hardware modules for installation on small first-person view (FPV) drones, long-range strike drones, or even the gun turrets of uncrewed ground robots.
The Future of Autonomous Warfare
So even if fully autonomous systems remain rare, expect more drones and robots to gain specific autonomous AI capabilities that complement human decision-making on the battlefield. The war in Ukraine has become a proving ground for AI-enabled military technology, with both sides rapidly iterating on autonomous and semi-autonomous systems.
The key distinction emerging from the Ukrainian conflict is between fully autonomous weapons—those that can select and engage targets without human intervention—and semi-autonomous systems that retain meaningful human control. The latter appears to be Ukraine's preferred approach, consistent with its stated commitment to international humanitarian law and efforts to prevent civilian casualties.
The one-time "Terminator" test reveals both the technical feasibility and the profound ethical questions surrounding autonomous weapons. As AI capabilities continue to advance, the international community faces urgent questions about how to regulate these systems and ensure they remain consistent with legal and ethical norms.
This story was updated on June 12 to add more details on Ukraine's current policy against using such fully autonomous drones, and to clarify that Kokhanovskyy's company Aero Center was not involved in the one-time battlefield test of the technology.
