US firm arms 50,000 Ukrainian drones with AI that tracks targets on its own
A $100 million deal fits Ukraine's cheap FPV drones with AI that can finish a strike on a moving target even after losing its link to the pilot.
What happened: Ukraine's military has started fielding SkyFall-made Shrike drones fitted with AI targeting kits from the US company Auterion. Under a $100 million contract funded by an unnamed European country \u2014 reportedly Germany \u2014 Auterion plans to deliver 50,000 of these kits in the coming months, its largest order yet. Each AI-equipped Shrike costs about $2,000, versus roughly $400 for a purely manually flown version. An operator still flies the drone near a target and marks it on screen; then they can flip a switch and let the drone finish the strike on its own, guided only by its onboard camera.
Why it matters: These drones can keep flying toward a locked target even if they lose radio contact \u2014 from terrain, buildings, or Russian jamming, all common on the front. Because targeting runs on the camera instead of GPS, it also shrugs off satellite jamming. That resilience, combined with a price a fraction of Western 'precision munitions' costing six or seven figures each, could let Ukraine strike far more often without training more operators. It also pushes warfare further toward machines completing what a human only started, sharpening the question of who answers for a strike once the connection is gone.
How it works, plainly: Auterion replaced the drone's basic flight controller with one built around an $18 chip running its AI, called Skynode S. The operator flies the drone in and taps the target on a screen; from there the drone tracks and homes in visually, no satellite signal required. A companion system, Nemyx, lets one person send several drones after several targets: point the group at an objective and they divide up targets, re-prioritizing automatically as some are destroyed, without more input beyond the initial order to strike or abort.
The rollout: This is Auterion's second major Ukraine order, after a $50 million Pentagon-backed contract for 33,000 kits in 2025. Future software updates could unlock full autonomous swarm strikes, already demonstrated at a US test range where one pilot directed three drones onto three separate targets. Auterion's CEO says the company still insists a human pick the target \u2014 for now \u2014 though he admits adversaries may eventually force fully autonomous drone-versus-drone fights. Meanwhile the US military still lacks a shared operating system to run autonomous drones from different makers together at scale.