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Both Russia and Ukraine are already using drones powered by artificial intelligence on the battlefield. It's part of a high tech arms race that has many people worried, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He's warned that AI could start leading decisions on the battlefield as early as next year. Meanwhile, the founder of one of Ukraine's top companies producing AI-powered drones says that they're helping Ukraine survive a war waged by a much larger enemy. NPR's Joanna Kakissis reports from Kyiv.
JOANNA KAKISSIS, BYLINE: It's a good microphone.
YAROSLAV AZHNYUK: It's almost like a weapon.
KAKISSIS: We meet Yaroslav Azhnyuk in a conference room, and for security reasons, he asked us not to reveal much else about the location. He's 37, a computer scientist and serial entrepreneur who spent years in Silicon Valley. Before the war, he was known for cofounding a successful company called Petcube...
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KAKISSIS: ...Which makes smartphone powered cameras that watch and even entertain your pets.
AZHNYUK: These cameras allow pet parents to watch their pets when they're not at home and fling treats to them and shine a laser toy for them.
KAKISSIS: Then, in 2022, Russia launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine, and Azhnyuk, like many Ukrainian tech leaders, turned his focus to the defense space.
AZHNYUK: I was like, OK, I got to move on from my role as a CEO of Petcube and do something to protect my country. And so now we're making not cameras that fling treats, but cameras that fling explosives to people who came to occupy our land.
KAKISSIS: The cameras he's talking about are part of an image recognition system incorporated into first person view, or FPV, drones.
AZHNYUK: This year alone, Ukraine will produce over 7 million of FPV drones, those small drones. They've fully transformed the battlefield, and they have become, for our era, what the tank or machine gun have become for World War I.
KAKISSIS: Azhnyuk runs the defense tech firms The Fourth Law and Odd Systems.
AZHNYUK: We are the leaders in autonomous drones and thermal cameras. We're No. 1 in Ukraine, maybe to some extent, close to the top globally.
KAKISSIS: Team has developed a widely used strike drone called the Lupynis-10-TFL-1. It combines a small affordable FPV drone with an autonomous terminal guidance system. That means the drone has an onboard computer and AI technology that takes control during the final phase of the flight.
AZHNYUK: But it's very different from, say, the kind of AI that sits on those data centers that power Claude or even kind of AI that does self-driving for your Tesla.
KAKISSIS: Azhnyuk says the AI technology in his company's drones uses simple tools to recognize images and make smart software.
AZHNYUK: Which then allows you either to navigate autonomously without a human or to choose a target autonomously or to fly towards the target autonomously.
KAKISSIS: Dozens of Ukrainian military units already use The Fourth Law's autonomous drone, which is named after the 20th century Ukrainian poet Anatoliy Lupynis. He endured decades of Soviet imprisonment and torture. The Fourth Law has named all of its weapons after Ukrainian intellectuals and artists killed or persecuted by Russians in the last century.
AZHNYUK: It is important for us to help to resurrect those people. They're still with us. Their ideas are still with us, and they are now fighting back.
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KAKISSIS: The company's teams test the drones every day. We meet one team in an overgrown field outside Kyiv. They've set up a foldout table near a copse of trees and a hornet's nest.
Nice to meet you, too. Very nice to meet you.
STAB: No worries.
KAKISSIS: A slight, sandy-haired man greets us.
STAB: I'm head of the test and integration team, so our main duties is integration of our autonomous system on the different kind of drones.
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KAKISSIS: He uses the military call sign STAB (ph). The company asked NPR not to reveal this location or the identities of those who work here for security reasons. STAB points to a drone.
STAB: So you see here is our camera plus microcomputer inside.
KAKISSIS: Oh, there it is. Oh, there it is.
STAB: And all of the mind is here.
KAKISSIS: The microcomputer inside the drone runs on a deep learning neural network that's been fed hours of combat footage. That's how it recognizes targets.
STAB: What target is like vehicle, light armored vehicle, tank and flying object, et cetera.
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KAKISSIS: The drone begins its flight guided by a pilot. He also asked us to use his call sign, PROFESSOR (ph). The pilot is the one who selects the target. He guides the drone with a control stick. PROFESSOR checks a video monitor. There's a red flash.
OK, is it locking there?
STAB: Yeah, it's locked, and if you see, the system is working by itself.
KAKISSIS: The drone has locked onto the target.
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KAKISSIS: A dilapidated car that a company employee is driving along a dirt road. PROFESSOR puts down the control stick, and the drone flies itself to the car. The microcomputer inside constantly runs algorithms to keep it on course.
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KAKISSIS: STAB says AI drones are useful because they're hard to jam, and he insists there are safeguards in place so the drones don't go rogue.
AZHNYUK: It's very obvious for the public to be concerned.
KAKISSIS: Back at the conference room, Yaroslav Azhnyuk says it's obvious the public is concerned about the dangers of AI.
AZHNYUK: You know, any kind of tool can be used for good or for bad, and it's - in the end, it's the human that decides how to use that tool.
KAKISSIS: And he says his company's AI-powered drones are not autonomous killer robots.
AZHNYUK: They're very far from a terminator of kind of scenario, right? These are just sort of calculators. Like, they're no more likely for a terminator uprising than a warehouse with artillery shells.
KAKISSIS: He does, however, acknowledge that AI warfare is developing quickly.
AZHNYUK: It's not unthinkable to imagine that some years in the future, there will be drones that will be able to make their own decisions about designating something as a target or not.
KAKISSIS: And Ukraine must keep up, he says, because Russia is also using AI-powered drones to attack.
AZHNYUK: So if we're not able to react just as fast, we have lost. And obviously, after we've lost, there is no way for us to argue about the ethics of AI.
KAKISSIS: The most important thing, he says, is don't die.
Joanna Kakissis, NPR News, Kyiv.
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