10,000x: Ukraine Firm's AI Drone Takes Over Final 500 Meters of Flight

Yaroslav Azhnyuk runs two Ukraine-based defense firms, The Fourth Law and Odd Systems, that build AI-powered drones for Ukrainian military units. Dozens of those units field his autonomous drone, the Lupynis-10-TFL-1. Azhnyuk says AI makes drones faster and harder to counter. "When the other side has orders of magnitudes higher capabilities, it gives you an asymmetric advantage," he said. "It can make you 10,000 times more effective."

Azhnyuk, 37, spent years in Silicon Valley and started several companies. One, Petcube, sells AI cameras that watch pets and dispense treats. "These cameras allow pet parents to watch pets when they're not at home," he said. "We sold a million of these devices that are quite popular in the U.S."

After Russia's 2022 invasion, Azhnyuk was living in Ukraine and shifted to defense work. "I was like, OK, I've got to move on from Petcube and do something to protect my country," he said. "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 Lupynis TFL-1 pairs a low-cost first-person-view drone with an autonomous terminal guidance unit. An onboard computer takes over during the final 500 meters, about 0.3 miles, of flight. "But it's very different from, say, the kind of AI that sits on those data centers that power Claude," Azhnyuk said. "Or even the kind of AI that does self-driving for your Tesla." The drone's name honors Anatoliy Lupynis, a 20th-century Ukrainian poet and political activist who spent years in Soviet imprisonment and psychiatric torture.

The Fourth Law tests the drones daily in a field outside Kyiv. The company's head of test and integration, who uses the call sign Stab, showed a drone flight to a reporter. A pilot using the call sign Professor steered the drone off a control stick, selected a target on a monitor, and released the stick once a red flash appeared. "That means it has locked," Stab said. The drone flew itself toward a dilapidated car driving on a dirt road. "See, Professor is doing nothing, and the drone is doing everything itself," Stab said. The test drone carried no explosive payload.

Stab said the drones resist jamming and that humans still select targets. Azhnyuk said his drones are not autonomous weapons. "They're very far from a Terminator kind of scenario, right?" he said. "These are just sort of calculators. Like they're no more likely for a Terminator uprising than a warehouse with artillery shells."

Russian forces also field AI-enabled drones. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned that AI could make battlefield decisions as early as next year. Azhnyuk said he cannot wait for that debate to conclude. "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 said. "Because their systems are capable of making decisions in microseconds, and human control takes minutes, hours and sometimes days."

Azhnyuk said he accepts that weapons raise ethical questions. "It has been with humanity since the invention of fire or steel," he said. "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." He added that some future drones could decide on their own whether to designate a target. The Fourth Law's weapons carry the names of 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 said. "Their ideas are still with us. And now they're fighting back."