Russia’s “cyborg pigeon drones” are real enough to worry about, even if the hype isn’t fully proven

If this sounds like a meme from the darker corner of the internet, welcome to 2026.

A Moscow-based neurotech company called Neiry is claiming it can produce “cyborg pigeon drones” by implanting electrodes in their brains, mounting a small control module, and then nudging the bird’s flight decisions through targeted brain stimulation.

The project has been reported under the codename PJN-1. Birds blend in, they do not scream “UAS” to everyone within earshot, and they don’t run out of battery 25 minutes into a mission. For those reasons, Neiry says these birds can be guided in real time after surgery, without the kind of long-term training you would expect with traditional animal handling.

Depending on which report you read, the stated use-cases range from infrastructure monitoring to bombing, to the kind of “quiet” surveillance that makes everyone’s skin crawl and imagination run wild.

What’s actually happening, and where’s the proof?

We’ve seen scientists and researchers hook up electrodes to the brain of animals before, but these “pigeon drones” stand out because of the ongoing Ukraine/Russia conflict, and the huge uptick in FPV-related casualties.

Researchers have published on methods to alter pigeon motor behavior using brain stimulation and the neuro-device challenges that come with it, and there are peer-reviewed results showing increasingly fine control, including work discussing altitude control.

That matters because it separates two questions:

• Can electrical stimulation influence a pigeon’s flight behavior? The research world says yes, to a degree, but robotic pigeon drones have yet to be seen in a public environment.
• Can a startup reliably field “living drones” the way they are implying in headlines? That is the part where independent verification gets thin, and ethically… hell no.

Even some of the reporting that repeats Neiry’s claims also notes the lack of independent confirmation of the company’s real operational capability beyond promotional material and statements.

Why pigeons, and why now?

Pigeons are the perfect ghosts. They are everywhere, nobody calls 911 because a pigeon landed on a ledge, and they can move through environments where GPS-denied quadcopters get jammed, spotted, or netted.

The people that do call 911 over a bird sighting won’t get enough attention to make a difference.

In a world where drone detection, RF monitoring, and counter-UAS are getting sharper by the month, the incentive to sidestep “drone-shaped problems” is obvious. This is also why the story keeps circling back to funding, influence, and who is connected to whom. Several reports point to Kremlin-linked money and ties around the ecosystem supporting Neiry.

The Ethical Issues

If the tech works the way it’s being sold, this is invasive control of a living animal for human objectives. Even if the company insists it is “civilian only,” that is not a safety guarantee, it’s a press line.

Counter-UAS systems are built around identifying and defeating aircraft, signals, and flight behaviors. A pigeon is not an aircraft. In dense areas, it becomes much harder to separate “nature” from “platform,” and that is exactly why this concept is attractive to anyone thinking about surveillance, smuggling, or reconnaissance.

DroneXL Take

Here’s the part that keeps nagging at me. How the hell are they trying to spin cyborg “pigeon drones” as a “civilian application?”

Even if you ignore the ethics for a second, the practical side still gets ugly fast. Modern electronic warfare is what I grew up thinking of as Sci-Fi. If a company is bragging about remote influence over an animal’s brain, it’s fair to ask what happens when that system gets hit with interference, high-powered RF energy, or any kind of directed energy environment.

Not in a “lol the signal drops” way, but in a “does this kill the subject?” way. If you are sticking electronics and electrodes into a living creature and then directly changing how it interacts with the world, you are gambling with outcomes you cannot undo.

The site I found looked sketchy as hell. It reads less like a serious medical or neurotech lab and more like a glossy front that could just as easily be a front for crypto laundering. It lists a rat and an ape with implants too, it talks about phases, timelines, milestones, everything. That is not how credible science sells itself to the public.

What it sounds like, plain and simple, is a Neuralink-style trajectory. Start with animals, normalize it, scale the narrative, and then push into human testing and “integration.” That scares the hell out of me, and it should scare anyone reading this. Even Neuralink is a terrifying concept for more than one reason. The upside is astronomical for people who truly need it, but the temptation for humans to use brain interface tech for objectively bad reasons is basically guaranteed. If this kind of capability exists in any workable form, intelligence agencies have been drooling over it for a long time.

This is not “training” an animal. This is functionally enslaving a brain and body that cannot consent, cannot communicate pain or distress in a meaningful way, and cannot opt out. Humans have pushed animal testing to cruel extremes for thousands of years. The idea that we are now branding invasive neural control as a product, not just a thought experiment, is completely messed up.