AI wrote the code to make a $100 drone stalk a person using facial recognition

EXCLUSIVEArtificial intelligenceArtificial intelligenceAI wrote the code to make a $100 drone stalk a person using facial recognitionA new evaluation reveals how publicly available AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI can create software to control cheap drones and track a person based on facial recognition.Listen to this article with a free profile00:0000:00Andon Labs has developed a benchmark to evaluate AI systems' ability to utilize drones without human intervention.Chelsea Stahl / NBC News; Getty ImagesShareAdd NBC News to GoogleAug. 5, 2026, 7:31 PM EDTBy Jared PerloSAN FRANCISCO — A drone powered by AI-written software stalks its human target around the house using facial recognition, gliding through doorways and navigating around lamps. It isn’t a scene from science fiction. The cheap consumer drone, flying hands- and (mostly) human-free, is being directed by programs built with widely available AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI and other companies.The demonstration is part of an evaluation called Drone-Bench, designed by a team of San Francisco researchers at Andon Labs with input from researchers at Anthropic. The AI systems were prompted (by humans) with simple instructions to fly the drone and track a person based on a picture downloaded from the internet. Lukas Petersson, one of the co-founders of Andon Labs, said he and his team wanted to highlight just how quickly today’s AI systems are advancing — showing they are capable not only of drafting emails or providing recipe tips but also of shattering the divide between the virtual and physical worlds.Many people conceived of AI “as a chatbot, and then it became an agent that could do things digitally on your computer,” Petersson said from Andon Labs’ headquarters against a backdrop of spare robot parts and other AI experiments. “We also want to show that, yes, AI can now go into the real world.” The zeal to translate AI’s growing capabilities into visceral and physical displays is at the heart of Ando...