Ukrainian drone strikes targeting Yandex data centers expose critical physical vulnerabilities in major artificial intelligence systems.
An adversary can interrupt an artificial intelligence system without defeating its software. It need only strike the infrastructure that keeps the system running. Ukraine proved the point inside Russia this past week.
President Trump and his national security team should take note before an enemy tries the same thing here. On October 8, a Ukrainian drone attack forced Yandex, the technology company often called "Russia’s Google," to suspend operations at its Sasovo data center. The next day, another strike knocked out several modules at its Kaluga facility, which Yandex had called its most powerful data center in Russia. On October 11, the company announced that its Vladimir-region data center had shut down completely after a drone attack. Ukraine disrupted three major Yandex computing facilities in four days.