Lawmakers Must Act Now to Prevent Armed Police Drones

This is not science fiction. It’s not premature. If towns, cities, states, or the federal government want to act to reign in the emergence of armed police drones and robots, we have precious little time. In the absence of substantial regulation around when and how domestic law enforcement in the United States can deploy force using drones, the companies that markets technology to law enforcement have been moving. It’s past time concerned people take notice. Cities should not procure weaponized drones or robots, and multi-purpose drones and robots should be restricted from causing harm. 

Since 2021, EFF has been advocating against the use of armed robots or drones by law enforcement. This call has become more urgent as companies are moving in to take advantage of the lax regulatory landscape.

This month, two disturbing developments raised concerns that we might be on the verge of a larger trend of drone militarization. The first is that the CEO of Skydio, one of the most prolific vendors of police drones in the United States, signaled that the company has a more permissive attitude toward arming their drones in some contexts than many people expected. When asked on a podcast about the public perception that the company had restrictions around letting the military arm their drones, CEO Adam Bry said, “This is an area where I’ve gotten some things wrong. We said some things previously that led folks externally and internally to believe that, for example, we would prevent the military from putting weapons on our drones […] It’s very easy to sit back in a Silicon Valley office and think that we’re very smart, that we know the technology, and the idea of using it for X, Y, or Z thing seems evil or bad, so we’re going to write a policy or ban people from doing it. I think that’s ultimately misguided.”

Simply put: he is signaling that Skydio will not implement restrictions on their customers’ use of their devices. 

Bry was specifically asked about the military arming drones but the question reveals a disturbing truth: whether police arm drones domestically is currently based more on the internal ethical commitments of companies than it is any laws created by elected officials. Combining Skydio’s huge amount of police contracts, including supplying entire fleets for Drone as First Responders (DFR) programs, and the tendency of military technologies like surveillance aerostats to get redeployed on U.S. soil, creates a real recipe for the emergence of armed police drones. 

The other piece on the chess board to keep our eye on is the introduction of weaponized drones as a tool of school safety. A company called Campus Guardian Angel will run pilot programs in schools in Georgia and Florida in Fall 2026 to introduce drones that are designed to swarm, distract, crash into, and even shoot irritants at potential school shooters. This comes just years after a large national backlash that got the large police tech company Axon to pause its development of drones armed with tasers as a solution to school shootings. 

Although it may be obvious to some people, it’s worth saying again: antagonizing an active shooter with a small drone is a dangerous idea. In chaotic situations, deploying physical harm via drone is likely to get bystanders or good samaritans hurt by accident. It is also unproven that this technology will work to distract or deter an actual school shooter–especially when the demonstrations we see online revolve around crashing drones into stationary mannequins in pristine, controlled conditions. Another important question: What would happen if a potential shooter shoots at the small moving drone and endangers the people fleeing behind it? After all, in the demonstrations we’ve seen it is unclear if these drones have the ability to see what is behind them.  This is an unproven and potentially dangerous method of combating the very serious problem of gun violence in schools, and it’s one that helps to normalize armed drones as a solution to other policing problems as well. 

These developments also mean It’s not enough to follow San Francisco’s lead, which became the first city to change its policy regarding how robots could be used in order to ban police from using deadly force via robots in 2022. A robust and effective policy must include both drones and robots (not one or the other), and it has to explicitly prevent drones and robots from deploying any body harm — including deadly force and less-lethal measures like kinetic strikes, pepper spray, rubber bullets, or tasers. In addition, cities and states should not procure weaponized drones and robots. 

Since 2021, EFF has been advocating against the use of armed robots or drones by law enforcement. This call has become more urgent as companies are moving in to take advantage of the lax regulatory landscape. We cannot continue to rely solely on the good will of companies that make their money selling technology to police departments to protect us from dangerous police technology. Lawmakers need to act now.