Fully autonomous drones killed Russian soldiers during a battlefield test two years ago, according to a Ukrainian drone manufacturer. If true, the incident would represent another milestone in a war that has spurred unprecedented developments in military drones, robots, and AI-guided weaponry.

The one-time test was revealed by Alexander Kokhanovskyy, CEO of the Ukrainian drone maker Aero Center, during an interview with New Scientist at a press event hosted by the Ukrainian embassy in London. Kokhanovskyy described the test—which did not involve his current company Aero Center—using quadcopter drones that were preprogrammed to fly to a front-line area before activating an AI-powered “Terminator mode” that would seek out and attack any target in the given area.

There was apparently no video feed or anything else to show what the “Terminator” drones targeted and attacked. But Kokhanovskyy told New Scientist that human-piloted drones sent to check out the aftermath found “a couple” of dead Russian soldiers, which led to the conclusion that the fully autonomous drones had killed them.

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A decade after the global craze for Pokémon Go peaked, an AI company has been using billions of real-world images captured by millions of players to develop navigation technologies for delivery robots and possibly military drones. That represents an intriguing but potentially discomfiting legacy for an augmented reality mobile game that has incentivized gamers to capture short smartphone videos of physical neighborhoods and landmarks.

The AI company, Niantic Spatial, was spun out of Pokémon Go game developer Niantic in May 2025, after Niantic separately sold its licensed games such as Pokémon Go to the Saudi-backed video game publisher Scopely. But before that deal, Niantic publicly announced plans to use scans from millions of Pokémon Go players along with data captured by users of the company’s Scaniverse app to train and develop a “large geospatial model”—a 3D model of the physical world trained on the geolocated images provided by app users scanning real-world locations.

“Ground scans were one component to help train Niantic Spatial's real-world foundation models —AI systems that learn to recognize and interpret physical spaces,” a Niantic Spatial spokesperson told Ars. “The models are the product of that training, not a copy of or a means of accessing the underlying scans, which were of public points of interest such as statues and fountains.”

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