Ukraine is developing strike missiles augmented by artificial intelligence, a first and a significant step as its offensive weapons become increasingly autonomous.
Brave1, the Ukrainian state-backed innovation platform, confirmed to Business Insider that multiple companies involved in this initiative are developing AI-enabled missiles.
Ukrainian companies have widely incorporated AI into their drones and war robots, enabling functions such as decision-making, navigation, and targeting. Missiles are new.
"AI was initially deployed at scale in drones," Andrii Hrytseniuk, Brave1's CEO, told Business Insider. "It's not that fast — it's sufficient for the drones, but missiles require much higher speeds."
Hrytseniuk shared that AI is now "increasingly being integrated into missile systems as well. Although it hasn't reached the scale of hundreds of solutions seen in the drone sector, we are already seeing first successes and plenty of developments in progress."
More than 200 Ukrainian companies were developing AI-based parts for missiles, drones, radars, and other systems, Hrytseniuk said in an earlier interview in May.
Efforts to integrate AI into missiles appear to have ramped up as Kyiv invests in developing long-range strike weapons, often used to attack military and energy targets inside Russian territory.
Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's former defense minister who pushed for advances in battlefield innovation and just launched a high-profile venture fund in Kyiv to invest in military startups, said this week that one of his priorities is "low-cost strike missiles and, eventually, missiles powered by AI."
It's unclear how the Ukrainian companies are using AI in the country's missiles and how far along they are in the development process. The technology will add to Kyiv's capabilities, but won't remove humans entirely from the process, Brave1 said.
The approach echoes Ukraine's use of AI in warfighting systems more broadly. Both soldiers and defense companies have stressed that humans must remain involved in operations in some capacity, saying that drones can't act entirely on their own.
The war has become significantly more autonomous over the past year as Ukrainian and Russian drones flood the battlefield. They constantly monitor the front lines, creating a miles-wide "kill zone" where any movement could trigger a precision strike.
Ukrainian officials have set out to replace soldiers with ground robots and drones in particularly dangerous missions — such as casualty evacuation and logistics — whenever and wherever possible, reflecting the push to become more autonomous.