Communications of the ACM

A military drone that attacked soldiers during a battle in Libya's civil war last year may have done so without human control, according to a recent report commissioned by the United Nations.

The drone, which the report described as "a lethal autonomous weapons systems," was powered by artificial intelligence and used by forces backed by the government based in Tripoli, the capital, against enemy militia fighters as they ran away from rocket attacks.

The fighters "were hunted down and remotely engaged by the unmanned combat aerial vehicles or the lethal autonomous weapons systems," according to the report, which did not say whether there were any casualties or injuries.

The weapons systems, it said, "were programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: in effect a true 'fire, forget and find' capability."