Artificial intelligence is pushing warfare into a new era, the Financial Times reported, as coordinated swarms of unmanned drones move closer to reshaping the battlefield. Sophisticated software now enables fleets of drones to overwhelm enemy defenses, bringing militaries nearer to deploying what was once a distant goal.

Lorenz Meier, chief executive of the US-German start-up Auterion, told the newspaper that the debut of its “drone swarm strike engine” marked a turning point. He said the company’s Nemyx software allows individual drones to act as a single, integrated force, with compatible models upgraded easily to function as networked weapons.

Although the system has not yet been used in combat, Auterion has secured a Pentagon contract to deliver 33,000 AI-powered “strike kits” to Ukraine before the year’s end. These can be upgraded with Nemyx to operate as coordinated swarms. “They know that it will saturate their defences,” Meier said. “They are all talking about swarming; they are all wary of swarming.”

'Leveraging the single human'

Swarm technology also reduces the manpower needed to launch complex operations. A single soldier can direct multiple drones at once, a development that Gundbert Scherf, co-founder of the defense firm Helsing, described as a way of amplifying human capacity. “The whole idea of swarms is that you are force multiplying. You’re leveraging the single human,” he said. Helsing, in partnership with German software company Systematic, recently announced its own AI-based swarm system.

Early experiments in swarming date back nearly a decade. In 2016, the US Navy dropped microdrones from F-18 fighter jets, while China showcased its capabilities the following year. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine in 2022, domestic start-ups have accelerated their development. Kiev-based Swarmer, for example, claims its technology has already been used in more than 82,000 combat missions.

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Swarmer’s co-founder and CEO, Serhii Kupriienko, compares an intelligent swarm to a living organism. Drones communicate, chart their own paths, and execute operations independently. 

Both Russia and Ukraine have already adopted elements of swarm tactics. Russia has used large waves of inexpensive drones to overwhelm air defenses in Ukrainian cities, increasing strike success rates. But the new generation of AI software promises to go further, enabling drones to learn and adapt, something previous systems, which merely relayed communications from larger drones, could not achieve.

'Swarming algorithms could revolutionize industries'

Ukraine’s defense-tech sector believes it has a crucial advantage: access to a vast trove of classified combat data. The so-called Universal Military Dataset is available only to Ukrainian companies and provides unique training material for AI models. “Drone swarming has long been treated as an ambitious goal,” said Eveline Buchatskiy, managing partner of Kiev-based venture capital firm D3. She argued that the country’s “unprecedented volume of combat data available to train autonomy models” was “the essential building block for swarming.”

Developers say progress is accelerating. Michael Holm of Systematic noted that open software systems make integration faster and easier, saying, “We’re talking weeks, days and weeks, to integrate and make the swarm operational, not years and months.”

Still, critics warn that delegating more decision-making to algorithms blurs the line of human control over weapons. Fully autonomous systems without human oversight are prohibited under international law.

“We’ve of course built autonomy in, but we’ve always made sure that the human is in the loop,” said Helsing’s Scherf. “This is very much where companies are built around European values and European doctrine.”

Another challenge lies in electronic warfare, where adversaries can jam the navigation and communication signals that swarms rely on to remain synchronized.

Beyond military use, swarming algorithms could revolutionize industries from agriculture to disaster response. Multiple drones acting in concert could inspect infrastructure, plant crops, or search rubble after earthquakes. Start-ups mainly in Silicon Valley and Shenzhen are already exploring civilian applications, from warehouse automation to firefighting and crowd monitoring. Analysts caution, however, that such commercial uses depend on regulators setting clear standards for safety and data governance.