A Russian drone chose its own target and killed three. The code that told it what to look for was readable

Ukrainian investigators have recovered an unencrypted American AI module from a Russian Molniya drone that killed three civilians near a Zaporizhzhia gas station on July 6. The drone, which was flying without any radio antennas, had been programmed to fly toward the gas station and set the general target area before launch. Once near the site, the onboard system identified and selected the specific objects—most likely propane tanks it had been trained to recognize—on its own.

The Nvidia Jetson Orin minicomputer, which costs a few hundred dollars, was found in the wreckage and contained both terrain imagery for visual navigation and object-detection code that defined what the drone was trained to target. This marks the first documented case of a self-targeting drone killing civilians, according to drone experts and military officials.

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