Western intelligence organizations suspect that Russia has transferred to Iran the technology that enables the use of AI on advanced attack drones.
Israeli sources said that in the Ukraine war, Russia used attack drones with AI that helps them to autonomously detect pre-designed targets and avoid early detection.
TAL Inbar, an Israeli senior expert on unmanned systems, said that a drone that has an AI-powered system can detect and hit targets precisely and navigate when radio communications are lost. ” The Russians are using these AI capabilities on their drones”
The drone can completely stop radio communication thanks to this transition from manually piloted systems to autonomous platforms. These drones’ blind conventional electronic warfare systems that depend on recognizing and interfering with frequencies by operating in total radio silence.
Traditional First-Person View (FPV) drones require a continuous, high-bandwidth radio signal between the pilot and the aircraft. Russian systems, like the autonomous variants of the Molniya armed drone, use localized neural networks and specialized software to scan the landscape manually.
The AI processes live camera feeds locally to identify military vehicles, infrastructure, or personnel without human intervention.
Russian forces employ AI to modify flight mechanics and pathfinding to evade radar detection or interception along conventional routes:
Drones fly quite close to rivers and water reservoirs by using automated visual navigation. They successfully avoid radar detection by hiding behind natural terrain features thanks to this low-altitude profile.
The AI program triggers an internal cruise control if the drone experiences localized signal jamming. Signal jammers are rendered ineffective as the neural network uses visual cues to autonomously stabilize the flight path and direct the asset toward its intended location. Russia has also updated its operational tactics to overwhelm and confuse defense systems:
AI flight controllers enable drones to travel in pairs or execute sharp, high-altitude dives. This sudden movement disrupts the tracking algorithms used by automated anti-aircraft guns
By removing the requirement for one pilot per drone, autonomous configurations allow Russian units to launch waves of drones simultaneously, exhausting local defenses through sheer volume. The evolution toward fully autonomous drone systems has forced a shift in counter-drone strategies, requiring the deployment of physical kinetic interceptors—such as dedicated AI-powered “hunter” drones—to visually track and shoot them down.