PDB Afternoon Bulletin | August 25th, 2026: Russia Just Crossed a Terrifying AI Threshold & Washington Reopens Embassies

**Megyn Kelly** (0:00)
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**Mike Baker** (0:49)
It's Tuesday, the 25th of August. Welcome to the PDB Afternoon Bulletin.
Okay, fine. It's more like the Early Evening Bulletin today. I'm Mike Baker. Your eyes and ears on the world stage. All right, let's get briefed.
First up, Russia crosses a dangerous new threshold in Ukraine, deploying an AI guided drone that made the final targeting decision in an attack that killed three civilians. In other words, removing the human from the decision about whether to kill humans.
Later in the show, despite the ongoing hostilities between the United States and Iran, Washington prepares to return diplomats to embassies evacuated from the region during the war, suggesting perhaps that the administration does not expect full skill fighting anytime soon. But first, today's afternoon spotlight.
Russia is now testing a new generation of attack drones in Ukraine that can identify and strike targets without a human operator making the final decision. Ukrainian investigators say one of those drones killed three civilians in Zaporizhzhya last month after its onboard artificial intelligence system selected a gas station as a target. And the computer powering the system was an inexpensive, commercially available device made by the American technology company, NVIDIA. The attack happened on July 6th when a group of roughly six Russian drones approached the city. One of them was directed toward a gas station where Ukrainian officials believe it had been trained to recognize and attack propane tanks. The drone crashed into a wall before reaching the tanks and exploded, killing three people. Among the victims was a 19-year-old university student who had taken shelter near an apartment building after hearing explosions. According to Ukrainian investigators, human operators had selected the general destination and sent the drone toward the gas station. But once it reached the area, the drone's on-board computer took over and selected the exact target on its own. And that distinction is what makes this story so important and troubling. Both Russia and Ukraine already used drones with artificial intelligence during the final stage of an attack. A human operator selects a target, and then the AI guides the drone through the final few hundred yards. That allows the weapon to continue tracking its target, even if electronic warfare cuts the connection with the pilot. But the drones Russia tested in Zaporizhzhya reportedly removed the human operator from that final decision. The system was trained using thousands of images so it could recognize certain categories of objects, including propane tanks, and decide what to strike after reaching the target area. Ukrainian officials say the recovered drones did not have antennas and were not emitting radio signals. That meant there was no pilot controlling them remotely and no communications link for Ukrainian forces to jam. Investigators also recovered the computer that appears to have guided the weapon. It was an NVIDIA Jetson Orin, a small AI module designed for civilian robotics and machine vision applications. The device was not encrypted, allowing Ukrainian investigators to examine the information stored inside. They say they found terrain images used to guide the drone, along with coding that revealed the kind of objects the system had been trained to recognize. NVIDIA confirmed that photographs of the recovered hardware showed one of its Jetson Orin computers. The company says the devices are consumer-grade products, sold to students and developers and startups, and were never designed for military use. NVIDIA does not sell them in Russia, but the computers are widely available through resellers and cost only a few hundred dollars. Once they enter the secondary market, NVIDIA says it has almost no ability to track where they ultimately end up. The circuit board carrying the NVIDIA chip was marked, made in China, although it remains unclear how Russia obtained the device. Essentially, Russia did not need to develop a classified military computer or manufacture an advanced chip from scratch. It appears to have taken an inexpensive civilian product, combined it with targeting software and installed it inside a mass-produced attack drone. Ukraine's Defense Intelligence Agency says a similar NVIDIA computer was recently found inside a new Russian missile known as the S-71M monochrome. Investigators believe that system may also be using AI for guidance.