AI incident #121 ·

Autonomous Kargu-2 Drone Allegedly Remotely Used to Hunt down Libyan Soldiers

What happened

In Libya, a Turkish-made Kargu-2 aerial drone powered by a computer vision model was allegedly used remotely by forces backed by the Tripoli-based government to track down and attack enemies as they were running from rocket attacks.

Only the incident metadata is stored here. The underlying news reports are on the AI Incident Database (CC BY-SA 4.0); use the links above to read them.

News reports (3)

Coverage catalogued by the AI Incident Database. Titles link to the original publisher; the text is not reproduced here.

Who was involved

Alleged deployer
Tripoli Based Government
Alleged developer
Stm
Alleged harmed party
Libyan Soldiers

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
AI
Intent
Intentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
AI tangible harm near-miss
Sectors
defense
Countries
LY

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 4.2.

  • Business operations/infrastructure damage

    "Business operations/infrastructure damage - Damage, disruption, or destruction of a business system and/or its components due to malfunction, cyberattacks, etc."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Violence/armed conflict

    "Violence/armed conflict - Use or misuse of a technology system to incite, facilitate or conduct cyberattacks, security breaches, lethal, biological and chemical weapons development, resulting in violence and armed confl...

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Security & Defense

    "AI could enable more serious incidents to occur by lowering the cost of devising cyber-attacks and enabling more targeted incidents. The same programming error or hacker attack could be replicated on numerous machines....

    The Rise of Artificial Intelligence - Future Outlooks and Emerging Risks (Allianz2018)

  • Catastrophic risk due to autonomous weapons programmed with dangerous targets

    "AI could enable autonomous vehicles, such as drones, to be utilized as weapons. Such threats are often underestimated."

    The Rise of Artificial Intelligence - Future Outlooks and Emerging Risks (Allianz2018)

  • Hazardous Biological and Chemical Technologies

    "AI systems such as LLMs, chemical LLMs (Skinnider et al., 2021; Moret et al., 2023), and other LLM- based biological design tools might soon facilitate the production of bioweapons, chemical weapons, and other hazardous...

    Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)

  • Warfare and Physical Harm

    "The use of AI in warfare is highly alarming and may pose dangers to human safety (Hendrycks et al., 2023). Autonomous drone warfare is being aggressively pursued as a tactic in the current war in Ukraine (Meaker, 2023),...

    Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)

  • Cyber offence

    "General- purpose AI systems could uplift the cyber expertise of individuals, making it easier for malicious users to conduct effective cyber- attacks, as well as providing a tool that can be used in cyber defence. Gener...

    International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI (Bengio2024)

  • Dual use science risks

    "General- purpose AI systems could accelerate advances in a range of scientific endeavours, from training new scientists to enabling faster research workflows. While these capabilities could have numerous beneficial appl...

    International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI (Bengio2024)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

All incidents in this subdomain