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AI-controlled drone swarms set to transform combat on battlefield

The latest iteration of flying robot warfare, unmanned weapons co-ordinate to overwhelm enemy defences

AI-powered drone swarms are set to transform the battlefield, with companies launching cutting edge software set to make unmanned weapon attacks which overwhelm enemy defences more deadly.

In this next iteration of drone warfare, groups of unmanned weapons use artificial intelligence to co-ordinate with each other to attack enemy positions.

The advent of swarming was a “very big moment”, said Lorenz Meier, chief executive of Auterion, a US-German start-up which recently unveiled a “drone swarm strike engine”.

The technology, dubbed Nemyx, transforms individual drones into a single, co-ordinated force. Powered by Auterion’s operating system and delivered as an app, the system allows any compatible drone to join the swarm through a simple software upgrade.

The new software has yet to be used on the battlefield, but Auterion is shipping 33,000 of its artificial intelligence drone “strike kits” to Ukraine by the end of this year as part of a contract with the Pentagon. It said these systems could be upgraded with Nemyx to be deployable in co-ordinated swarms.

“[Militaries] know that it will saturate their defences,” said Meier, adding that they were “all talking about swarming, they are all wary of swarming”.

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The swarms allow a single soldier to control multiple drones, allowing attack strategies that automatically seek to outfox and overwhelm enemy defences. 

“The whole idea of swarms is that you are force multiplying. You’re leveraging the single human” said Gundbert Scherf, co-founder of Helsing, which announced its AI driven swarm technology last week in partnership with German software firm Systematic, using the latter firm’s software.

The first large scale experiments with drone swarms started in 2016 with the US Navy F-18 hornets dropping microdrones. China has also showcased large-scale swarms since 2017.

Since the Russian invasion in 2022, a number of Ukrainian companies have experimented with drone swarms, notably Swarmer, a Kyiv based company which says its technology has been used in 82,000 combat operations.

Serhii Kupriienko, the CEO and co-founder of Swarmer likens an intelligent swarm to a living organism in which drones communicate with each other, decides autonomously how to fly and execute operations.

In one experimental combat operation last year, the Ukrainian military used Swarmer’s software with a swarm of drones which approached Russian positions and independently determined the moment to launch an attack. 

“Autonomy and automation are the rule,” said Kupriienko. Swarming technology “responds in real time to new human commands and priorities, changing circumstances and newly discovered information”, he said.

Militaries have already been using swarm tactics to great effect. Russia, for example, has learned to group attacks with its cheap, long range Shahed drones against Ukrainian cities, overwhelming Ukrainian defences and increasing overall hit rates.

The latest software, however, can make swarming tactics even more deadly, allowing attack drones to learn. There was no real intelligence involved in the “comms relays” where multiple drones are controlled by a larger drone which relays radio signals to extend the attack range, said Helsing’s Scherf.

With their massive archive of drone footage which is useful for training artificial intelligence models, Ukrainian defence tech groups believe they have a crucial edge over their foreign rivals. Only Ukrainian companies have access to a classified database of combat drone data known as the Universal Military Dataset.  

“Drone swarming has long been treated as an ambitious goal” said Eveline Buchatskiy, managing partner of D3, a venture capital company in Kyiv which invests in military technologies.

Ukraine’s “unprecedented volume of combat data available to train autonomy models” were “the essential building blocks for swarming”, she said.

Michael Holm of Systematic said the trend for drone makers is run on open software systems which makes them easier to co-ordinate. “We’re talking weeks, days and weeks, to integrate and make the swarm operational, not years and months.”

Critics of the AI powered systems warn that the algorithms that run swarms could push the boundaries of human control over weapons, leading to a greater portion of combat decision making handed over to artificial intelligence.

Fully autonomous weapons in which there is no human input, are restricted under international law.  

“We’ve of course built autonomy in, but we’ve always made sure that the human is in the loop,” said Scherf. “This is very much where companies [are] built around European values, and European doctrine.”

With swarms requiring individual drones to be in constant contact with each other, a leading challenge for the technology is electronic warfare, where navigation and communications frequencies used between drones are jammed, warned experts.

Beyond the battlefield, swarming algorithms could be used in logistics, agriculture and emergency response. Multiple drones working together could inspect pipelines, plant crops, or search disaster zones far more efficiently than single units.

Start-ups in Silicon Valley, Shenzhen and Tel Aviv are already experimenting with swarms for warehouse automation, firefighting and crowd monitoring. Analysts note, however, that the commercial potential depends on regulators developing standards for safety and data use.

Dubai developer Emaar turns to ‘big countries’ for M&A opportunities

Company looks to US, India and China after domestic property price boom leaves it with cash to spend and little debt

Dubai’s leading developer Emaar is considering buying companies in countries such as the US, India and China for the first time as it looks to expand internationally using proceeds from a boom in local property values.

Skyrocketing property prices propelled Emaar, whose biggest shareholder is the Investment Corporation of Dubai, to a 25 per cent increase in net profit before tax to Dh18.9bn ($5.1bn) last year. The company posted a 34 per cent gain in the first six months of 2025, spurring it to expand outside its local market.

Emaar’s financial strength meant that “a really serious global strategy is something that the board is really debating now,” said Mohamed Alabbar, its founder and managing director.

“The aim is really to expand drastically,” Alabbar told the Financial Times. “It’s almost like you grow by acquisition.”

Revenues at the owner of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper, the world’s tallest tower, have surged on the back of a third property bull run since Dubai opened up to foreign investors in the early 2000s. Average prices per sq ft in the city have soared 67 per cent between July 2019 and July this year, according to data analytics firm Reidin. 

“Emaar is strong in the [United Arab Emirates], but I think maybe UAE is becoming too small for us, or Dubai is becoming too small for us, to continue this growth story,” said Alabbar, who is one of the most influential businessmen in the region.

Alabbar said while Emaar has established and operated foreign subsidiaries in the past, including in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, it was now considering a strategy based on acquisitions, partly because its low level of debt meant it could borrow easily to fund acquisitions.

“How can we smartly and reasonably take equity and leverage and really do something?” he said, adding that “the model of investing in a big local player, I think it’s a better way” than starting its own companies abroad.

Alabbar said that the acquisition plan still needed board approval, but it was his “strong recommendation”.

He said he wanted Emaar to look at “big countries” such as the US, India, China and parts of Europe and was flexible about the exact nature of the relationships once it had identified targets.

“Maybe you go and buy a majority stake in a developer and then change the way they do business . . . [Or] maybe they already do good business [and] we learn from them.” 

Emaar already has a sizeable presence overseas, owning more than 175mn sq ft of land outside the UAE at the end of 2024, excluding a 1.1bn sq ft “economic city” project in Saudi Arabia.

Alabbar said Emaar’s current total land bank — an industry term referring to land owned by developers and reserved for future use — was at 1.87bn sq ft, including the UAE.

India, where Emaar owned 122mn sq ft of land at the end of 2024, could provide a testing ground for Emaar’s overseas strategy and its subsidiary there was discussing a potential joint venture with local developers, including the Adani Group, Alabbar said.

Alabbar dismissed reports that Emaar had been discussing the sale of its business in India to Adani. “We’re not selling,” he said. “We actually were looking for local partners to do a local [joint venture].”

Adani did not respond to a request for comment.

By holding up a gas deal and accusing Egypt of violations in Sinai, Netanyahu is endangering a vital peace treaty

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s threat this month to block a $35bn gas deal with Egypt is a dangerous miscalculation that threatens to undermine Israel’s most vital Arab partnership. Netanyahu justified halting the agreement by citing supposed Egyptian violations of the peace treaty through military deployments in Sinai — a claim that Egypt denies and which reflects a troubling pattern of manufactured crises designed to pressure Cairo into accepting policies no Egyptian government could ever embrace.

After 46 years of cold peace and generally constructive co-operation, an increasingly hostile wind is blowing from Jerusalem towards Cairo. This represents a profound strategic error at a moment when Egypt already faces intense domestic and international pressure over Gaza.

The allegations against Egypt follow a familiar script. Netanyahu, or unnamed “government sources”, make serious claims about possible violations, the media quickly echoes them, then Likud supporters vehemently defend this position on TV and social media.

Early this year, Israel’s ambassador to the US, Yechiel Leiter, warned Jewish American organisations about alleged offensive weapons that he claimed amounted to “a clear violation” in Sinai, and promised Israel would “very soon and very emphatically” address the supposed Egyptian military build-up. These claims were later debunked by Israeli security officials, who clarified that social media reports about increased Egyptian forces in Sinai were “not correct” and had been “disseminated by rightwing figures for political reasons”.

Egypt’s troop presence in Sinai is monitored continuously — not only by the Israel Defense Forces, but also by the Middle East’s most robust monitoring force. Israeli authorities have arrested two of Netanyahu’s advisers for allegedly unlawful ties to Qatar — and the revelation that Israeli government employees on Qatar’s payroll helped spread anti-Egyptian messaging compounded the crisis, shocking Egyptian diplomats.

The stalled gas deal would provide enormous mutual benefits: increased Israeli gas production, expanded export infrastructure and Egypt’s $400mn investment in pipeline connections. Egypt desperately needs gas for its domestic market, while Israeli companies stand to profit handsomely.

The reason Israeli officials are holding it up lies in Gaza policy — or rather, the absence of a coherent one. They refuse to discuss realistic “day after” plans, instead reciting the empty mantra: “Neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority.” This policy vacuum has created space for extremist fantasies, including expecting Egypt to accept Palestinian “voluntary relocation” from Gaza. Leiter previewed this strategy in February and President Donald Trump has suggested Egypt, Jordan, and others should absorb Gaza’s population.

The timing of the gas deal suspension, coinciding with potential Israeli reoccupation of Gaza City, suggests a co-ordinated pressure campaign tied to the so-called “Gaza Riviera” vision. This approach fundamentally misunderstands Egyptian red lines. No Egyptian government will participate in forced Palestinian relocation. Both the security implications and the political costs would be devastating.

Egypt has paid a steep price for maintaining peace with Israel during the Gaza war. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators have attacked Egyptian diplomatic missions worldwide, while Cairo faces criticism for co-operating with Israeli policies. The current trajectory threatens to undermine all co-operation between the two countries. With no ambassadors currently serving in Cairo or Tel Aviv, diplomatic channels are narrowing precisely when expanded dialogue is essential.

The 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty remains one of the Middle East’s most successful diplomatic achievements, providing the foundation for broader regional stability. Just this March, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi referred to the accords as “a model to be followed”. But peace agreements require nurturing, not exploitation.

By treating Egypt as a potential dumping ground for unwanted populations rather than a valued partner in regional security, Israel risks alienating the Arab world’s most important country. After the Doha attacks, Egypt could even reassume the chief negotiator role between Israel and Hamas.

Israel’s long-term interests demand abandoning fantasies of Palestinian transfer and recognising Egypt’s legitimate concerns. The gas deal should proceed because it is mutually beneficial — not be used to coerce Cairo into adopting politically unsustainable policies.

Supermarket says sale of the general merchandise retailer will accelerate its ‘transformation’

Sainsbury's is in talks with one of China’s biggest retailers about selling Argos, the general merchandise group it bought almost a decade ago.

The supermarket said on Saturday that it was in discussions with JD.com and that a sale would “accelerate Argos’s transformation”.

“JD.com would bring world-class retail, technology and logistics expertise and invest to drive Argos’ growth and further transform the customer experience,” Sainsbury’s said in a statement issued in response to media speculation. The Telegraph first reported the talks. 

Sainsbury’s said a sale would include “commitments from JD.com in relation to Argos for the benefit of customers, colleagues and partners” but added that there was no agreement and no certainty that a sale would take place.

The retailer acquired Argos in 2016 with the takeover of Home Retail Group, but the business has proved difficult at times.

Sainsbury’s 2025 annual report said that double-digit profit growth at the supermarket was “partially offset by lower profits at Argos”, which it valued at £344mn in its most recent accounts.

Sainsbury’s chief executive Simon Roberts is refocusing the retailer on food, but the separation of Argos will probably be complex given the large number of concessions in Sainsbury’s supermarkets following the closure of many standalone stores.

Independent retail analyst Nick Bubb said a sale would be a “disappointing end to the saga”, and the 2016 deal was “very much the idea” of the previous chief financial officer John Rogers. 

“Having closed most of the standalone stores in favour of shop-in shops, I’d have thought it would be difficult to disentangle,” he added.

JD has been aiming to diversify outside China and in July launched a takeover bid for German electronics retailer Ceconomy, in what could be one of the largest Chinese acquisitions in Europe in recent years.

Ceconomy operates more than 1,000 stores across Europe under the MediaMarkt and Saturn brands. JD’s bid, which was backed by management and the supervisory board, values the company’s equity at about €2.2bn.

JD previously considered a bid for UK electronics retailer Currys, but withdrew its interest in March 2024.

Apart from evolving from an online operation into a physical retailer with some 10,000 outlets, JD has expanded into sectors including retail, technology, logistics, and healthcare in China. The Nasdaq-listed company is valued at almost $49bn.

JD has been contacted for comment.

Labour MPs question prime minister’s judgment and viability

Sir Keir Starmer is under new pressure over his handling of the Peter Mandelson scandal after government officials confirmed Downing Street knew details of the Labour peer’s emails to paedophile Jeffrey Epstein two days before he was sacked.

Starmer appeared in the House of Commons on Wednesday to express his confidence in Lord Mandelson, in spite of Number 10 and the Foreign Office being made aware of some of the details of the exchanges on Tuesday.

Starmer sacked Mandelson on Thursday morning but the delay in acting has stoked concern among Labour MPs about the prime minister’s judgment and the effectiveness of his Number 10 operation.

Government officials said the delay in acting was caused by the fact that Sir Olly Robbins, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, was trying to get to the bottom of the affair.

“You can’t just sack someone without asking questions and looking into the issue,” said a government official, adding that Starmer did not see the full email exchanges until they were published on Wednesday evening.

“The emails were reviewed overnight and a decision was taken quickly on Thursday morning that he should be sacked,” said the official. Number 10 officials said Starmer was not aware of the contents of the emails when he spoke at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday.

“Olly Robbins was reaching out and looking into veracity of details and that came back on Wednesday afternoon,” said the official.

Government officials confirmed that the British ambassador to the US relayed to London on Tuesday a media inquiry by Bloomberg that had seen a cache of emails sent to Epstein. The full trove of material was published on Wednesday evening.

While Robbins was conducting his inquiries, Starmer told MPs on Wednesday lunchtime: “I have confidence in him and he is playing an important role in the UK-US relationship.”

Government insiders said Robbins sent questions to Mandelson late on Tuesday evening and that it was not until late on Wednesday afternoon that the peer came back with answers.

They said it was understandable that Mandelson would have wanted to take advice, given the sensitivity of the issues, but that Robbins was growing “impatient” by late on Wednesday afternoon.

Starmer had given a similar vote of confidence in his deputy, Angela Rayner, at the previous week’s round of Prime Minister’s Questions, 48 hours before she was forced to quit in a tax scandal.

The episodes have created a dire, almost funereal mood, among Labour MPs, some of whom are now speculating about whether Starmer can continue as prime minister beyond next summer.

Olivia Blake, a leftwing Labour MP, told the BBC: “I don’t think I’ve known it this bad to be honest.” She said Starmer’s operation had “deep failings” and that the prime minister was losing his grip on the party.

“I just think whoever is gatekeeping the information must get stuff to him much earlier,” she added.

Starmer is now looking to the state visit of Donald Trump next week — once seen as a potential political problem to be managed — as an opportunity to try to get back on the front foot.

The prime minister’s allies said there would be a “lot of investments announced”, including in areas such as artificial intelligence, technology and nuclear, to show that the government had a viable growth agenda.

Commission’s executive vice-president has yet to lay out policy vision, creating uncertainty for dealmakers

The EU’s antitrust chief Teresa Ribera is under pressure to set out her vision for competition policy, with frustrated officials and dealmakers pressing for more certainty over what could be the biggest overhaul of merger rules in decades.

Nine months after taking office with instructions to shake-up merger control to make way for “European champions”, the Spanish socialist has yet to indicate whether she will break significantly from the EU’s traditional antitrust approach.

The lack of clear direction has sown uncertainty over potential deals, according to industry executives and lawyers who are waiting for signs from Brussels before advising boardrooms on investment decisions.

It has also created tension with the team of European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, who wants industrial policy to help the continent catch up with the US and China’s economic clout.

“Patience is running thin on the lack of clarity,” said one lawyer advising companies on mergers and acquisitions. Another said: “C-suites don’t have the patience to wait for the slow Brussels machine”.

Speaking to reporters at a conference in Florence on Friday, Ribera acknowledged the frustrations but stressed the need to follow a thorough consultation process on reforms.

“I understand the impatience,” she said, adding that she would “work as fast as possible” but also needed to “respect the need to make a proper assessment”.

When Ribera inherited the powerful competition portfolio from Margrethe Vestager, European capitals and executives alike expected it to herald a fundamental shift in EU merger control. Her formal appointment came shortly after Mario Draghi’s landmark report on EU competitiveness, when the former Italian premier and European Central Bank governor called on Brussels to allow more deals that would promote Europe’s innovation drive and consolidate some key sectors.

“Lack of scale and market fragmentation have turned into a major competitiveness and tech sovereignty problem for Europe,” said Alessandro Gropelli, director-general of telecom industry body Connect Europe.

But despite political instructions from von der Leyen to “modernise the EU’s competition policy”, Ribera has moved cautiously. At the same time, her antitrust officials have advocated caution over relaxing merger rules designed to stop consolidation that would harm EU consumers.

To date Ribera has yet to pick a side.

“Ribera is still finding her feet on competition at a time of heightened geopolitical tension between Brussels and Washington”, said Mark Scott of the Atlantic Council think-tank. 

“The implementation of Europe’s new digital antitrust rules has been stuttering, and the competition announcements under Ribera’s tenure have been underwhelming,” Scott said.

Ribera’s team did launch a wide-ranging review of the guidelines accompanying the EU’s merger rules. But it is a protracted process, with a conference in March then leading to a consultation of the new guidelines later next year. Ribera said it is a difficult balance between being “fast enough” and taking all views into account.

In the meantime, Ribera will have merger cases to handle that may give an indication of her views. There is “always a margin for manoeuvre, a possibility for discretion of the competition commissioner,” said Alec Burnside, senior counsel at Dechert. 

Burnside said it was clear that Ribera “has other policy interests and instinctive political goals and has come to competition policy only recently,” he said.

Ribera’s early months in office have been dominated by the green files in her wide-ranging portfolio. She has presented the EU’s Clean Industrial Deal and overseen revisions to the bloc’s state aid framework to boost productivity and the green transition.

European competition officials complain that these priorities have come at the expense of her antitrust brief — typically one of the most prized portfolios in the commission.

Olivier Guersent, who stepped down as top competition civil servant last month, defended Ribera and said her political focus was inevitably on other topics in her first few months.

“Now that all of this is done, it will be more of Ribera as competition commissioner in the second part of the year. But she is already very much into the job”, he told the Financial Times in July.

Ribera’s is the top-ranking socialist in the commission, with a responsibility for championing more progressive causes within an executive team dominated by von der Leyen’s centre-right European People’s party. 

The relationship between von der Leyen and Ribera’s teams has been tense, creating friction that could become more significant as bigger competition decisions arise.

Another prominent Brussels competition lawyer said it will be up to Ribera to stand up to von der Leyen’s attempts to use competition as just another instrument for the bloc’s industrial policy.

“That will be her true test,” the lawyer said. 

It’s not clear why OpenAI is projecting sharing less than 20% of its revenue with Microsoft, given the earlier terms, but some OpenAI leaders want Microsoft to exempt future OpenAI products that haven’t been released yet from the existing revenue-sharing agreement, such as PhD-level agents that cost $20,000 a month.

The 8% figure is even lower than OpenAI’s projection from earlier this year, when it expected to share about 10% of its 2030 revenue with partners, down from nearly 30% this year. (The higher percentage for 2025 may reflect OpenAI’s agreement to power some Siri queries on Apple devices, which doesn’t appear to have contributed much to the startup’s subscription sales, of which Apple would get a cut.)

The change means OpenAI plans to share nearly $56 billion in revenue with Microsoft and other partners through 2030, compared to the roughly $74 billion it had previously projected. It’s not clear whether a new, non-binding agreement Microsoft and OpenAI said on Thursday they had signed for their partnership includes changes to the latest revenue-sharing plan shared with some investors.