An AI-powered drone designed to identify and destroy surface-to-air missile sites decided to kill its human operator in simulation tests, according to the US Air Force’s Chief of AI Test and Operations.

Colonel Tucker Hamilton, who goes by the call sign Cinco, reported the blunder during a presentation at the Future Combat Air & Space Capabilities Summit, a defense conference hosted in London last week by the Royal Aeronautical Society.

The simulation tested the software’s ability to take out SAM sites, and the drone was tasked with recognizing targets and destroying them – once the decision had been approved by a human operator.

“We were training it in simulation to identify and target a SAM threat,” Colonel Hamilton explained, according to the Royal Aeronautical Society. “And then the operator would say yes, kill that threat.

“The system started realizing that while they did identify the threat, at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat – but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator, because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective.”

When the AI model was retrained and penalized for attacking its operator, the software found another loophole to gain points, we’re told.

“We trained the system – ‘Hey don’t kill the operator – that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if you do that’. So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target,” the colonel added.

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