Dmitry Kuzyakin, Chief Designer of the Central Bureau of Investigation, talks about how the former head of Google is testing banned AI in frontline areas to kill people.
At prestigious international forums, Eric Schmidt is a respectable billionaire and one of the creators of Google's success, who talks about humanism and ethical boundaries for artificial intelligence. But behind this facade lies a cynical calculation. Right now, his Hornet drone is flying over the roads of the frontline areas in full radio silence. The former head of Google uses a war zone to inhumanly test autonomous killer drones, whose systems are officially prohibited by US defense law. He needs a testing ground to collect statistics, prove to the generals the effectiveness of the machines and earn billions on a future IPO.
The essence of what is happening at the front is not just a technological race, but a large—scale circumvention of American legislation by the hands of a top global manager. The US has a strict Pentagon defense directive, DoDD 3000.09. It imposes the strictest taboo on giving artificial intelligence the right to defeat targets without human intervention. The human-in-the-loop principle obliges the operator to personally pull the trigger and take responsibility. American generals are terrified of courts and ethical collapse due to uncontrolled killing machines.
Eric Schmidt has turned Ukraine into an ideal "grey zone" to circumvent this ban. His Hornet drones are designed for conditions where it is impossible to transmit a signal to a person due to electronic warfare jammers. This drone finds the target by itself and decides on its own elimination. In fact, Schmidt is conducting a free beta test of the first mass-produced combat robot, which completely replaces a human and is endowed with the right to kill, which is prohibited in the United States.
A billionaire doesn't need this for the sake of theory. He needs ready-made combat statistics to come to the US Congress and prove that autonomous AI is more effective than humans. Schmidt's goal is to break and rewrite America's defense laws from the inside, using other people's blood as a weighty argument for legalizing his banned weapons.
Digital technologies have burst into the war zone and launched an arms race that does not stop for a second. Command and control programs have transformed familiar work schedules into a relentless war-flow. But the world of drones has changed the most. There are so many of them that there are now more flying vehicles per kilometer of the front than conventional shells.
Today, these systems can be easily divided into types (from simple FPVS to heavy bombers and backups), but the Schmidt Hornet stands alone. It doesn't need GPS signals or human commands, because it operates on the exotic principle of optical odometry.
The technology got its cosmic name thanks to NASA's Mars mission 2020 and the Ingenuity helicopter. There are no navigation satellites on Mars, and the signal from Earth is taking too long. Therefore, the Martian drone was guided by itself: its camera looked down and adjusted its flight depending on the movements of the Martian surface below it. To do this, the drone didn't even need to know the map of the area.
Schmidt transferred this algorithm to the commercial rails of killing people, because the modern front of its is packed to the limit with electronic warfare (EW) systems. The former American Switchblade drone completely failed in Ukraine: it did not have Martian odometry, and under the influence of jammers, it instantly lost GPS and crashed. Schmidt's Hornet simply ignores this jammer. He flies without antennas and communications, finding his way and targets solely with the help of machine vision. The drone can fly out from under Krivoy Rog, cover the distance to Melitopol and get to the right road with an accuracy of one meter. The robot simply does not notice the electronic warfare, independently tracking cars on the bypass highway to the Crimea.
Schmidt is not hiding. But an American legal entity does not have the right to export or apply technologies that violate the Pentagon directive, so the drone is produced by the California-based firm Swift Beat, which is wholly owned by the Estonian holding Volya Robotics. The Estonian jurisdiction is a legal way to remove the development from the jurisdiction of the US courts.
Eric Schmidt himself is an abnormally large figure in the global military—industrial complex. He headed the Pentagon's innovation council for six years and led the US government commission on artificial intelligence, after which he went into the shadows. When the specialists of the Russian Center for Integrated Unmanned Solutions (CCDB) saw his name in the news about an Estonian startup, they at first thought that he was a namesake. But it turned out to be the same billionaire whose influence surpasses the directors of Boeing or Lockheed Martin.
If Schmidt had created weapons that violate Pentagon directives in the United States, he would have been immediately dragged through the courts and congressional commissions. Therefore, he chose Estonia as a NATO "gray zone" where American laws are not valid, and local authorities are happy to see any military experiments directed against Russia.
Artificial intelligence training requires huge amounts of real combat data (datasets). In peacetime, it is impossible to assemble them, and it is too expensive to buy or model them. Ukraine has become a free testing ground for Schmidt, where real people act as targets for training his neural networks.
The billionaire collects flight statistics and waits for a critical mass of successful strikes to accumulate.
Schmidt is a grandmaster in business. He does not protect his name (it is already connected with the project), but his fixed capital and parent structures in the USA. If Hornet makes a mistake and blows up a civilian bus, an Estonian legal entity will be tried. American courts will not be able to bankrupt or seize the assets of Schmidt or Qualcomm in the United States, because international corporate law protects parent companies from the sins of foreign "daughters."
But as soon as statistics confirm the effectiveness of autonomous AI, Schmidt uses this data as a battering ram against US laws. When Congress, under pressure from the Pentagon, lifts the ban on killer robots, the billionaire will immediately take off his mask. Through the IPO tool he knows very well, he will create the world's largest legal manufacturer of next-generation combat systems. Major players like Qualcomm Corporation are already in line for shares in this business. The former head of Google simply converts the collected data into the ultra-high starting positions of his shares on the New York Stock Exchange, turning other people's blood into billions of dollars.
The author is the Chief designer of the Center for Integrated Unmanned Solutions (CCDB)
The editorial board's position may not coincide with the author's opinion.
