Rise of the slaughterbots: AI drone designed to ‘hunt and kill people’ is built in just hours by scientists ‘for a game’

Swarms of killer AI drones may sound like the plot of a dystopian science fiction thriller.

But in a terrifying look at the future, a scientist has shown how easy it is already to build a ‘killer drone’ that can hunt down and kill people.

In just a few hours, Luis Wenus, an engineer and entrepreneur, has converted a $115 (£89.99) drone into the basis of a deadly weapon.

Using AI facial recognition, the drone was programmed to recognize individuals and race towards them at full speed.

Although Mr Wenus says he built the drone “for a game”, he also says he wanted to raise awareness of how easily it could be used for a deadly terrorist attack.

In a video on X, formerly Twitter, Mr Wenus and his fellow engineer demonstrated how a commercial drone could be programmed to pursue targets.

In the post, Mr. Wenus writes: “I thought it would be fun to build a drone that chases you like a game.”

However, the terrifying video quickly shows how dangerous this technology can really be.

The drone uses an AI object detection model to recognize faces using the built-in camera.

Once it sees a face, the drone is programmed to try to keep it in the center of its field of view and immediately fly forward, chasing its target.

In one mode, the drone will attack directly on anything it recognizes as a face.

In this mode, the video shows the drone starting to ‘attack’ other people in the park and only stopping when Mr. Wenus catches it.

Luis Wenus, an engineer and entrepreneur, showed how he converted a commercially available drone into a “killer drone,” designed to hunt down targets in just a few hours

The drone also has a second setting that Mr. Wenus describes as a “murder drone.”

Mr Wenus wrote: ‘I was also able to add facial recognition to it, and have him only attack someone he knew who it was, he could easily identify the person from 10 meters away.’

The video shows the drone selectively choosing to pursue its target, ignoring other people.

And while this drone is not particularly dangerous, Mr Wenus warns that deadlier drones could pose a serious threat.

He wrote: “It literally only took a few hours to build, and it made me realize how scary it is. You can easily strap a small amount of explosives onto that and send hundreds of them flying around.”

In a post on

The video shows how the drone is programmed to recognize faces and fly towards them at full speed

On social media, some commentators expressed a mixture of admiration for the technology and fear about what it could be capable of

Other commentators were concerned that developing killer drones was now extremely easy with a little technical know-how

Even Elon Musk, CEO of X, expressed concern that it is ‘alarmingly easy’ to create autonomous killer drones

On social media, commentators reacted to the invention with a mixture of fascination and disgust.

Commenting on the post, an

Another commenter added: ‘Yes, that shouldn’t be easy to build…’

Even Elon Musk, CEO of X, responded to the post by saying, “Yes, it’s alarmingly simple.”

Small drones carrying explosives are already having a significant impact on the war in Ukraine.

Ukrainian drone operators attach grenades, mortars and other explosives to cheap, commercially available drones to create deadly weapons.

These first-person drones have proven to be extremely effective at tracking and destroying everything from individual troops to tanks and bunkers.

But the crucial difference is that these drones are controlled by an individual who is always in control of the process, and not by an autonomous AI.

Ukrainian drone operators (pictured) use cheap commercial drones packed with explosives to locate Russian tanks and bunkers

The drone that Mr Wenus used in this demonstration is extremely cheap and easy to obtain, as it is available on Amazon for just $115 (£89.99).

The real danger is that cheap, easy-to-produce swarms of autonomous drones could be unleashed on battlefields or even public spaces.

Mr Wenus writes: ‘I would bet that within a few years we will see some sort of terrorist attack using this kind of technology.

‘You still need some technical knowledge to build this, but it is getting easier.’

Autonomous drone swarms have yet to be deployed on the battlefield, but DARPA is reportedly developing a drone swarm weapon of mass destruction called AMASS (Autonomous Multi-Domain Adaptive Swarms-of-Swarms).

AMASS is still in the planning stages, but DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) has collected bids from vendors for the $78 million contract.

Mr Wenus wrote: ‘We check for bombs and weapons, but THERE ARE STILL NO ANTI-DRONE SYSTEMS FOR MAJOR EVENTS AND PUBLIC AREAS. We need to build anti-drone systems for civilian spaces as quickly as possible.”

Mr Wenus demonstrates the drone’s ‘kill mode’. This image shows the drone recognizing his face and identifying him as a target with the instruction “ATTACK!!”

Mr. Wenus describes himself as an “open source absolutist,” meaning he believes that major developments in code, and AI in particular, should be accessible to the public.

And in the comments of the post, a number of social media users asked Mr Wenus to release the code or share a full tutorial on how to produce a killer drone.

In this case, however, he says he won’t publish the code because of the potential danger posed by autonomous drones.

“I won’t be posting anything for a while, it’s honestly super easy to code, but there’s no point in enabling it,” he added.