Scientists Show How Easy It Is To Create AI Drones That Can Hunt And Kill People

Luis Wenus, an entrepreneur and engineer, wanted to see if he could configure a small, commercially available drone to use artificial intelligence to target and track people using facial recognition. What he discovered turned out to be pretty terrifying.

It took him and Robert Lukoszko, another engineer, just a few hours to build what they refer to as a “AI-steered homing/killer drone.”

“I thought it would be fun to build a drone that chases you around as a game,” Wenus wrote on X (formerly Twitter).” It just uses an AI object detection model to find people in the frame, and then the drone is programmed to fly towards this at full speed as soon as it detects someone.

“This literally took just a few hours to build, and made me realize how scary it is. You could easily strap a small amount of explosives on these and let 100’s of them fly around. We check for bombs and guns but THERE ARE NO ANTI-DRONE SYSTEMS FOR BIG EVENTS & PUBLIC SPACES YET.

“I was also able to add face recognition to it, and only make it attack someone it knew who was, it could easily identify the person from 10 meters distance.”

If your first thought after seeing this is that something like this could be used in a mass shooting or bombing, you’re not alone. In fact, Ukraine has already tried doing this for military purposes.

“Makeshift factories are now popping up all over Ukraine and churning out thousands of FPV [first-person-view] drones each month,” Ian Lovett of the Wall Street Journal reported in February.

Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation says the country’s goal is to produce at least a million of these drones this year.

“My bet is that we will see some sort of terror attack using this type of tech within the next few years,” Wenus warned. “You still need some technical knowledge to build this now, but it becomes easier and easier.”

While Wenus calls himself an “open source absolutist” – which means he thinks all code and software should be shared with the world through open source channels – he says he won’t be sharing this code.

“It’s honestly super easy to code but no point enabling,” he wrote.