Backed by US investors, a Nigerian company has won a contract with the Nigerian military to supply weaponised drones to defend the country from terrorist attacks.
The company had previously stopped supplying the Nigerian military for geopolitical reasons. However, the US investors were instrumental in helping the Nigerian company to overcome the geopolitics and find talent.
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In January, it was reported that Terra Industries, a Nigerian defence company, had raised $11.75 million from US investors to scale its manufacturing capabilities.
The funding round was led by 8VC, founded by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. “The round, which includes only US-based investors, saw participation from Valor Equity Partners, Lux Capital, SV Angel, Leblon Capital, Silent Ventures, Nova Global, and angel investors, including Alex Moore, who sits on the board of Palantir, and California-based investor Meyer Malka,” Techpoint Africa said.
“The young startup has also been strategic about selecting its board members, bringing on Eliot Pence, a former executive at Anduril, a $14 billion defence company in the US. It has also recently added Alex Moore from Palantir to its board,” the outlet added. “These strategic moves have begun to pay off. Just a year after launch, the company recorded $2 million in total orders.”
With the new funding, Terra planned to expand its manufacturing capabilities, build more factories and hire additional engineering talent to boost production, to protect Africa’s critical infrastructure from terrorist attacks.
Now, three months later, Terra is arming its Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (“UAVs”) and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (“UGVs”), which are used for surveillance systems, with weapons.
“This is part of a classified project with the Nigerian military. According to sources, the system will be controlled remotely by military personnel and not by the company’s proprietary AI system, Artemis OS,” Techpoint Africa reported.
At the time of the funding round in January, Terra’s co-founder and CEO, Nathan Nwachuku, said that there were serious geopolitical issues to navigate, which made the company decide to stop building systems for the Nigerian military. However, since its fundraising, the company now says, “We need to protect Africa’s critical infrastructure from terrorist attacks. We have been a bit wary of calling ourselves a defence company, but now we’re doing it fully.”
The US investors have been “instrumental in helping us think through complex geopolitics, how to build a robust and flexible supply chain that is sanction-proof and how to attract the best talent,” he said. This pretty much indicates that it is the US investors running the show, fronted by a Nigerian company.
“It is still unclear whether the weaponised drones will be available to other clients or reserved exclusively for the Nigerian military,” Techpoint Africa noted, “Terra Industries declined to comment on the project.”
The thought of AI hunting down people to kill in Africa should send shivers down everyone’s spine. In 2023, we published an article warning about the dangers and risks of lethal autonomous weapons.
AI-guided drones, for example, place life-or-death choices on machines with minimal human oversight: a computer program is not able to distinguish between a combatant and a non-combatant, or a soldier who wants to surrender. It also blurs the boundary as to who is responsible for the killing, consequentially there is a risk of atrocities occurring without an appropriate person to hold responsible.
Despite concerns, AI-guided drones are already being deployed in active conflicts, such as Ukraine – by both sides. However, Ukraine and Russia were not the first. In Libya, a Turkish autonomous drone reportedly hunted and attacked human targets in 2020, marking the first confirmed use of an autonomous weapon in combat, according to a report from the UN Security Council’s Panel of Experts on Libya.
Read more:
- Drones may have attacked humans fully autonomously for the first time, New Scientist, 27 May 2021
- AI Begins Ushering In an Age of Killer Robots, The New York Times, 2 July 2024
- These Are the Lethal Autonomous Weapons That Terrify the US Military, Popular Mechanics, 3 June 2025
“Artificial intelligence is transforming modern warfare, enhancing surveillance, predictive maintenance, autonomous strikes, cyber operations, drone swarms, and psychological warfare, while raising ethical, legal and strategic concerns in a rapidly accelerating global arms race,” the magazine Open said.
Open goes on to describe the various ways in which AI is transforming warfare, including how “AI [is] shortening the ‘kill chain’.”
“Traditionally, the process of detecting a target and executing a strike, referred to as the sensor-to-shooter kill chain, could take several hours. AI has dramatically compressed this timeframe, reducing it to minutes or even seconds in some cases,” Open said.
What if AI makes a mistake, and it is simply a case of enabling the killing of more non-combatants or surrendering soldiers, faster than a human would be able to?
With the AI-guided drones being deployed by various countries, the US military is responding with projects like the Bullfrog robotic gun system, which is equipped with AI and computer vision to autonomously track and engage drones.
“Internally, we used to call the Bullfrog the ‘mini-CIWS’,” Allen Control Systems (“ACS”) cofounder and CEO Steve Simoni said. “But the CIWS control system isn’t as accurate.”
ACS is a defence technology company based in Austin, Texas, focused on developing autonomous precision weapon systems to counter drone threats. The Phalanx Close-In Weapon System (“CIWS”), originally developed by General Dynamics Corporation and now manufactured and further developed by Raytheon, is a semi-autonomous system that’s essential to defending Navy warships from incoming missiles.
The Pentagon’s current policy governing lethal autonomous weapons is to keep a human “in the loop” to avoid a potential “unauthorised engagement.” But the CIWS “is fully autonomous-capable, we’re just waiting for the government to determine its needs,” Brice Cooper, ACS’s chief strategy officer, said in 2024.
Read more: The AI Machine Gun of the Future Is Already Here, Wired, 11 November 2024
While current systems often retain a human-in-the-loop for final authorisation, experts warn that fully autonomous weapons could emerge rapidly, raising urgent ethical and legal concerns.
For US defence companies, where better to develop and test fully autonomous weaponised systems than in Africa under classified projects, hidden away from any and all scrutiny by the public in the West?
We should also ask ourselves: What are the chances that, at some time in the future, possibly even in the near future, the use of fully autonomous lethal weapons won’t be limited to wars; that they are used by rogue actors, such as terrorists, or even by governments against the defenceless populations of their own countries?
Further reading:
- We have less than two years before AI becomes a security problem we can no longer control, MP says
- What are the mystery drones flying over the US East Coast at night?
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Categories: Breaking News, World News