Western governments and technology firms have spent four years pouring targeting software, combat data, and cheap autonomous drones into Ukraine. The war has made the country the world’s largest live laboratory for military artificial intelligence. That is not a metaphor Kyiv rejects. Mykhailo Fedorov, then a senior digital and defense official, said the mission was to make Ukraine “the world’s tech R&D lab.”
The resulting risk is real. The evidence supports a proliferation problem: systems, data, and know-how moving faster than the rules meant to contain them.
