Fully autonomous drones with no human oversight have killed soldiers on the battlefield for the first time. This is according to a senior figure in the Ukrainian defence industry, marking a watershed moment in warfare. The one-off test involved 10 AI-controlled "Terminator" drones on the front line of the Ukraine war. "We tried it," says drone-maker Alexander Kokhanovskyy, who supplied the technology and spoke to at a press event hosted by the Ukrainian embassy. We never implemented it [more widely]." The test took place two years ago and involved quadcopter drones that were programmed to fly towards the front line, cover between 3 and 5 kilometres over around 10 minutes and then engage "Terminator mode", in which an AI model searches for and intercepts targets. "We just launch it and we know everything will be dead - everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead," says Kokhanovskyy. "There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, ...

Uncrewed ground vehicles have already been tested for defending the front line by the Ukrainian military. There's a received piece of wisdom among militaries around the world that whatever new technologies appear, in the end, foot soldiers are what matters. As British Army officer Field Marshal Archibald Wavell put it shortly after the second world war: "All battles and all wars are won in the end by the infantryman." This may now finally be changing. Robots in battle are about to reach a critical point for Ukraine. In May, it began the mass production of Legit, a low-cost robot capable of carrying a machine gun.

This week, with air raid warnings wailing in the distance, Kyiv held a funeral for two sisters. They had already lost their father who had been fighting on the front line. Their grieving mother is now the family's sole survivor. This is the human cost of the largest sustained Russian aerial assault so far - with 1,500 drones and 56 missiles fired at Ukraine within 48 hours. But the loss of life could have been even higher.

Nine people have been killed and at least 28 injured in the latest Russian drone attacks across Ukraine, local officials have said. They said the worst-hit was the central Dnipropetrovsk region, where eight people were killed and 11 injured throughout Tuesday. One casualty was reported in the eastern Donetsk region. Overall, 14 regions were attacked. On Wednesday morning, President Volodymyr Zelensky said more than 100 Russian drones were currently over Ukraine, warning of more waves of attacks throughout the day.

Could Iran be using China's BeiDou system? Drone strike hits Al-Rasheed hotel in Baghdad's Green Zone near US embassy, no casualties reported A prominent hotel in central Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone was struck by a drone, amid reports that Iraqi air defences intercepted an attack over the United States Embassy. The strike on Monday evening hit the top floor of Al-Rasheed Hotel, causing damage but no casualties, according to two Iraqi security officials cited by The Associated Press (AP) news agency. Security sources told the Reuters news agency that two Katyusha rockets had been intercepted that evening near the US Embassy in the Green Zone, which houses diplomatic missions as well as international institutions and government offices. Earlier Monday, the Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah announced that Abu Ali Al-Askari, a prominent security official with the paramilitary group, had been killed, without giving details on the circumstances.

Could Ukraine hold a presidential election right now? Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' 'Trauma does not define us': Living with loss in wartime Ukraine She pauses, looking up at the photograph fixed to the gravestone. His face bears a striking resemblance to hers.

Could Ukraine hold a presidential election right now? Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Russian drone attack kills 4 in Ukraine's Kharkiv as peace remains elusive A Russian drone attack on Ukraine's northeastern city of Kharkiv has killed at least four people and wounded six, officials have said, just hours after Washington accused Moscow of "dangerous and inexplicable escalation" of the war and as a peace deal remains distant. Kharkiv Regional Governor Oleh Syniehubov said Tuesday that the death toll from the attack on the outskirts of the frequently targeted city, just 30km (19 miles) from the border, had risen to four.

Which factors determine AI's propensity to support military intervention? While the use of AI in high-stakes decision-making is growing exponentially, we still lack systematic analysis of the key drivers embedded in these models. This paper conducts a conjoint experiment in which large language models (LLMs) from leading providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) are asked to decide on military intervention across 128 vignettes, with each vignette run 10 times. This design enables a systematic assessment of AI decision-making in military contexts. The results are remarkably consistent across models: all models place substantial weight on the probability of success and domestic support, prioritizing these factors over civilian casualties, economic shock, or international sanctions. The paper then tests whether LLMs are sensitive to context by introducing different motivations for intervention. The scoring is indeed context-dependent; however, probability of victory remains the most important factor in all scenarios. Finally, the paper evaluates numerical sensitivity and finds that models display some responsiveness to the scale of civilian casualties but no detectable sensitivity to the size of the economic shock.

Evaluating and measuring AI Safety Level (ASL) threats are crucial for guiding stakeholders to implement safeguards that keep risks within acceptable limits. ASL-3+ models present a unique risk in their ability to uplift novice non-state actors, especially in the realm of biosecurity. Existing evaluation metrics, such as LAB-Bench, BioLP-bench, and WMDP, can reliably assess model uplift and domain knowledge. However, metrics that better contextualize "real-world risks" are needed to inform the safety case for LLMs, along with scalable, open-ended metrics to keep pace with their rapid advancements. To address both gaps, we introduce MOCET, an interpretable and doubly-scalable metric (automatable and open-ended) that can quantify real-world risks.

An entire family - a married couple and their two young sons - have been killed in an overnight Russian drone attack in Ukraine's north-eastern Sumy region, local officials have said. Regional head Oleh Hryhorov said a residential building was hit in the village of Chernechchyna. The bodies of the two children, aged four and six, and their parents were later recovered from the wreckage. Ukraine's air force said its units shot down 46 out of 65 Russian drones across the country - but there were 19 direct hits in six locations. Russia's military has not commented.