July 2026: On the Ukranian battlefront, Russian military trucks have taken on a striped camouflage to trick AI models into not recognizing them. This “dazzle camouflage,” once used during WWI to break up naval ship silhouettes against the horizon, is now being used to fool machine vision models. “Because zebra-striped trucks are unlikely to appear in training data, an AI that encounters one in the real world may not realize what it is looking at,” says the RNL’s Dr. Todd Humphreys.
Machine vision models often rely on very specific features to recognize an object, leading to a problem known as “brittleness.” The Russian military aims to obscure these expected features with unexpected ones. Though battlefield drones are still flown by remote human operators, AI will soon take on more of the work as the drones proliferate, making these tactics likely to grow common.
Read more about the arms race pitting increasingly-sophisticated machine vision systems against clever methods to subvert them on The Economist.
