KYIV, Ukraine — Like many tech entrepreneurs in Ukraine, Yaroslav Azhnyuk turned to developing drone warfare after Russia's 2022 invasion.
Drones have transformed the way wars are fought. Azhnyuk says artificial intelligence is making drones faster and more capable.
"When the other side has orders of magnitudes higher capabilities, it gives you an asymmetric advantage," he says. "It can make you 10,000 times more effective."
Azhnyuk runs the Ukraine-based defense firms The Fourth Law and Odd Systems. They are among the top companies producing AI-powered drones in Ukraine. Dozens of Ukrainian military units already use their autonomous drone, called the Lupynis-10-TFL-1.
Russia is also deploying AI-enabled drones against Ukraine. AI warfare is part of a high-tech arms race that has many worried, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He has warned that AI could lead decisions on the battlefield as soon as next year.
Azhnyuk told NPR that he acknowledges the concern over destructive weapons but says it's not specific to AI.
"It has been with humanity since the invention of fire or steel," he says. "Any kind of tool can be used for good or for bad. And in the end, it's the human that decides how to use that tool."
Cameras that "fling explosives"
Azhnyuk is 37, a gregarious computer scientist who hails from a family of scholars and scientists. NPR meets him in a conference room in Kyiv; for security reasons he asked us not to reveal much else about the location.
He worked for years in Silicon Valley and started several companies, including Petcube, which makes smartphone-powered cameras that use artificial intelligence to watch and even entertain pets while they're alone.
"These cameras allow pet parents to watch pets when they're not at home," he says, "and fling treats to them and shine a laser toy for them. We sold a million of these devices that are quite popular in the U.S."
After Russia launched its full-scale war, Azhnyuk, by then living in Ukraine, pivoted to the defense space.
"I was like, OK, I've got to move on from Petcube and do something to protect my country," he says. "And so now we're making not cameras that fling treats but cameras that fling explosives at people who came to occupy our land."
The cameras he's talking about are part of an image recognition system incorporated into first-person-view or FPV drones.
"We are leaders in autonomous drones and thermal cameras," he says.
A drone named after a poet
The autonomous Lupynis TFL-1 drone combines a small, affordable FPV drone with an autonomous terminal guidance unit. That means the drone has an onboard computer and AI technology that takes control during the last 500 meters (or 0.3 miles) of the flight.
"But it's very different from, say, the kind of AI that sits on those data centers that power Claude," he says. "Or even the kind of AI that does self-driving for your Tesla."
Azhnyuk says this AI technology uses simple tools to recognize images and make smart software "which then allows you either to navigate autonomously without a human or to choose a target autonomously or to fly toward the target autonomously."
The Fourth Law's autonomous drone is named after the 20th century Ukrainian poet and political activist Anatoliy Lupynis, who endured decades of Soviet imprisonment and psychiatric torture. The company named all its weapons after Ukrainian intellectuals and artists killed or persecuted by Russians in the last century.
"It is important for us to help to resurrect those people," Azhnyuk says. "Their ideas are still with us. And now they're fighting back."
"The drone is doing everything itself"
The Fourth Law teams test the Lupynis TFL-1 drones every day. We meet one team in an overgrown field outside Kyiv. They've set up a fold-out table near a copse of trees and a hornets' nest.
A slight, sandy-haired man stands up from the fold-out table and says he's the head of the test and integration team. He uses the military call sign Stab. The Fourth Law asked NPR not to reveal this location or the identities of those who work here for security reasons.
Stab points to a drone.
"So you see here is our camera, plus the microcomputer inside this 3-D model," Stab says. "All of the mind is here," he adds with a laugh.
The microcomputer inside the drone runs on a deep-learning neural network that uses hours of combat footage to recognize targets.
"Like vehicles, light-armored vehicles, tanks, and flying objects," he says.
The drone begins its flight guided by a pilot, who also asked us to use his call sign, Professor. He navigates the drone with a control stick. He selects a target and checks a video monitor. Then he sees a red flash.
"That means it has locked," Stab says.
The drone has locked onto its target: a dilapidated car an employee is driving along a dirt road. Professor lets go of the control stick. The drone flies itself to the car. The microcomputer inside constantly runs algorithms to keep it on course.
"See, Professor is doing nothing, and the drone is doing everything itself," Stab says.
On the battlefield, the drone would carry an explosive to hit the car. The test drone doesn't have one.
Stab says AI drones are useful because they're hard to jam. He also insists safeguards are in place so The Fourth Law drones won't go rogue. Humans select the target, he says.
Survival vs. the ethics of AI
Back in the conference room, Azhnyuk says his company's AI-powered drones are not killer robots.
"They're very far from a Terminator kind of scenario, right?" he says. "These are just sort of calculators. Like they're no more likely for a Terminator uprising than a warehouse with artillery shells."
He does acknowledge, though, that AI is developing quickly. "It's not unthinkable," he says, "to imagine that some years in the future there will be drones that will be able to make their own decisions on designating targets or not."
That's the future. Right now he is focused on what Ukraine needs today.
"Our adversaries are using the very same technologies, and if they use AI for decision-making in an offensive scenario, and if we refuse to use AI in decision-making in a defensive scenario, we've lost, right?" he says. "Because their systems are capable of making decisions in microseconds, and human control takes minutes, hours and sometimes days."
If Ukraine loses, he says, "there's no way for us to argue about the ethics of AI."
The most important thing, he says, is don't die.
NPR's Polina Lytvynova contributed to this story from Kyiv.
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