US company’s AI lets Ukraine’s cheap kamikaze drones track targets on their own

There's a particular kind of arms-race logic playing out on Ukrainian battlefields right now, and it involves a $2,000 drone that can think for itself once the connection drops. Auterion, a US company, has struck a $100 million deal to equip 50,000 of SkyFall's Shrike FPV drones with autonomy hardware called Skynode S. The Ukrainian military started receiving the upgraded drones in mid-July, and the order is being fulfilled out of Auterion's Munich team, funded by what Reuters reports is Germany.

The pitch is simple but consequential. An operator flies a Shrike manually, points it at a target up to half a mile out, then flips a switch into what Auterion CEO Lorenz Meier calls fire-and-forget terminal guidance. From there the drone uses only its onboard camera to finish the job, no GPS required. That matters enormously on a battlefield where both sides jam GPS signals and radio links routinely, because it means a Shrike can keep chasing a moving tank or artillery piece even if buildings, terrain, or enemy jamming cut off the pilot entirely.

What makes this notable isn't just the autonomy itself but the price tag attached to it. Auterion built the system to run on an $18 Arm chip, pushing the cost of an autonomous Shrike to roughly $2,000, against $400 for a purely manual version. Meier draws a pointed contrast with how Western militaries typically buy precision weapons: six or seven figures per shot, in batches of dozens, on timelines measured in years. Shrikes have already knocked out tanks, artillery, electronic warfare systems, and reportedly two Russian Mi-28 helicopters worth as much as $19 million apiece, according to the Kyiv Independent. Cheap, mass-produced autonomy aimed at that kind of return is the bet Auterion is making.

The company isn't stopping at single-drone guidance either. It's already demonstrated swarm capability at a US test range, where one pilot directed three autonomous drones against three separate targets, letting the group reprioritize on its own so multiple drones don't pile onto the same target. Meier says operators, including totally inexperienced ones, can learn to fly a single drone or a swarm in about 60 seconds — you just steer roughly toward the objective and pick a target once you're close. He insists Auterion still wants a human making the final call, though he's candid that adversaries might not extend the same restraint forever.

Meier, who has made eight trips to Ukraine to work with local manufacturers, frames the country's drone program as a case study in fast iteration: companies show up with something merely better than nothing and refine it under real combat feedback rather than waiting for a finished product. He contrasts that with the Pentagon's more rigid Drone Dominance selection process, which doesn't easily let a company return with an improved pitch weeks later. Whether the US adopts that same tolerance for early failure, or simply borrows the lessons secondhand through vendors like Auterion, looks like the more interesting fight developing behind the one already underway in Ukraine's skies.