AI machines acting autonomously killed humans for the first time, it was revealed today. A report by Nury Vittachi
Ten AI-powered drones were given full authority to choose human targets and kill them, New Scientist reported in its latest edition.
The operation worked.
The killings took place in Ukraine two years ago, but the information was never before publicly admitted, the journal said.
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CLEARLY VISIBLE CORPSES
“We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” drone-maker Alexander Kokhanovskyy told the publication.
“There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed.”
Afterwards, the Ukrainians sent regular drones—fitted with cameras and piloted by humans—into the same area, to see if the AI had killed people. It had. There were clearly visible corpses and a disabled truck.
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USED ON OTHER OCCASIONS
This has probably happened on other occasions, the journal said.
“Reports in 2023 suggested that Ukrainian attack drones equipped with artificial intelligence were finding and attacking targets without human assistance – but were being deployed against vehicles such as tanks, rather than infantry,” the journal said.
Human casualties may well have been in the destroyed vehicles, but they wouldn’t have been visible.
Why are the Ukrainians revealing this horrific fact so casually? With the massive demonization of Russia in the western mainstream media, they likely think that no one will care, since the victims were Russian.
It’s worth noting that Ukrainian drone makers are working closely with the US and UK armed forces and doing shared tests in the area. And that warfare in both Ukraine and Iran are being used as training material for a US attack on China—more on that below.
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WHO’S IN FAVOR OF KILLER ROBOTS?
But seriously, we have to ask: are autonomous AI flying killer robots, with permission to kill humans of their choosing, a good idea?
Most people don’t think so.
In 2019, China and the majority of other countries of the world met at the UN to discuss a motion saying that killer robots are an obviously horrible idea and should be banned immediately.
Guess who disagreed with the motion?
You can guess the answer. Think of the four most ruthless nations.
Correct. The US, the UK, Russia, and Australia disagreed. (Ukraine hadn’t gotten into drones at that time.)
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LONDON HAS A TASTE FOR THEM
The British leadership definitely likes the idea of robots killing people.
In April last year (2025), the idea was floated in the Times of London, under the genteel headline "Drones may strike targets with no human input, says minister."
The word "drones" sounds nicer than "killer robots" and "strike targets" sounds better than “humans”, right, British government?
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BUT THE U.S. IS WAY AHEAD
No one doubts that the Pentagon is well advanced into making flying AI robots who can choose which humans to kill.
“The Pentagon has been trying to develop AI-powered autonomous drones for years,” said Katrina Manson, a US author who writes about AI weapons.
The US is developing flying killer robots called Goalkeeper and jet-ski style killer robots called Whiplash. Both are AI powered and have the power and ability to destroy humans of their own choosing, she says.
By putting AI into airborne or waterborne weapons and then giving them permission to kill humans, it means that the US can still keep killing people even when radio contact cannot be maintained.
“The military is also working to put AI directly into its ‘one-way attack drones,’ so they can navigate, locate targets and carry out lethal attacks even when wireless communications have been severed,” Manson said in a recent book.
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CHINA IS ULTIMATE TARGET
They are being prepared for war on China, Manson says. “Starting in 2022 the Pentagon’s Maven team began collecting enormous amounts of imagery of Chinese vessels in the Pacific, which they used to enable the creation of algorithms that drones operating there could use for targeting.”
The tragedy of all this is that many futurists, including author Isaac Asimov, saw this coming and warned against it.
His “first rule of robotics” states that a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
He believed that failing to follow this fundamental rule would doom the human race. Many people still agree.
And there are some who will stand up and say so. In February this year, Anthropic, one of the world’s top AI companies, told the US government that it did not want its tech to be used for autonomous weapons that kill humans.
The US Department of War immediately blacklisted Anthropic—and found an alternative partner, OpenAI, the same day.
🇺🇸/🇮🇷/🇵🇰 Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, says the Iran-U.S. Memorandum of Understanding will likely be finalized in the next 24 hours
It will be signed digitally, there will be no ceremony where Iranian and American officials sit side by side.
He warned Salam of ‘repeating the same mistake as Syria’, which involved granting concessions without receiving guarantees and reciprocal compensation.
Al-Sharaa stated that Israel’s strategy is pushing you toward granting gradual concessions without providing any guarantees, while simultaneously keeping open margins that allow it to expand the scope of its future aggressions.
A series of US airstrikes have killed 175 people in Nigeria. While the US military’s AFRICOM stated that 175 “terrorists” had been eliminated over the course of three days of bombing, locals state that dozens of civilians were killed, and countless more injured. Hospitals in Borno state were overrun with emergency cases.
The Nigerian government has been at war with Islamist rebels since 2009. Nigeria is just one of seven countries the second Trump administration has bombed.