Day: July 31, 2025

• A Ukrainian brigade said it used an FPV drone to deliver an escape bike to a trapped soldier.
• Its chief of staff said it took three tries with a Heavy Shot drone to make a successful drop.
• It’s one of the first recorded instances of an FPV drone being used for such logistics in a warzone.

A Ukrainian brigade said it used first-person-view drones to deliver e-bikes to a surrounded soldier, marking a rare instance where such devices were used to airlift a vehicle in battle.

In a video published on Wednesday, the “Rubizh” 4th Brigade of Ukraine’s National Guard said it dropped the roughly 88-pound e-bikes so the soldier could escape mostly Russian-controlled territory.

While the brigade didn’t say in the video when the operation occurred, it said the soldier had been trapped at a shelter near Siversk, a town in Donetsk, where fighting is still ongoing.

“The enemy was in front, behind, and on both flanks. Completely surrounded,” Mykola Hrytsenko, a junior lieutenant serving as the brigade’s chief of staff, said in the video.

The soldier, whom the brigade identified by the call sign Tankist, was the only survivor of four Ukrainian soldiers fighting in the area, Hrytsenko said.

“The Siversk direction is known for incredibly difficult logistics. Almost none exists there. Guys have to walk six to seven kilometers on foot to reach a position,” he said.

Hrytsenko said his team crafted an evacuation plan that involved heavy cargo drones, such as the Baba Yaga or Heavy Shot, carrying a bicycle with an electric motor to the exhausted soldier’s position.

Such drones are typically used in Ukraine as bombers and are designed to deliver payloads of about 40 to 50 pounds, though they can also airlift cargo.

Carrying a nearly 90-pound e-bike, Hrytsenko said, would push the drone to its limits and shorten its range to roughly 2 kilometers.

It took three attempts, brigade says

Hrytsenko said his team initially lost two drones trying to deliver e-bikes to the soldier. The first was shot down with the bike, while the second crashed because its motors burned out, he added.

But the “Rubizh” brigade published clips of the third drone carrying the bike via a winch system and the soldier appearing to receive the bike. Business Insider could not independently verify the authenticity of the brigade’s footage.

Hrytsenko said the bike’s parts were disassembled and brought to a nearby position on the frontline. Afterward, the vehicle was put together and flown to the soldier, he added.

“Everyone in HQ was shouting and crying like we’d just launched the first plane in the sky,” Hrytsenko said of the moment when the bike arrived.

The brigade also showed surveillance drone footage of a soldier riding an e-bike through the battlefield.

Hrytsenko said that while the soldier later struck a land mine, he was able to walk several hundred meters to a nearby friendly position, where drone pilots flew in another e-bike so he could fully exit the combat zone.

“The operation cost us two lost e-bikes, around $100,000, and two lost HeavyShot drones, $15,000 each,” Hrytsenko said.

The brigade said the soldier evacuated safely and showed interview clips of a man it said was Tankist. BI could not independently verify his identity.

Hrytsenko added that the e-bikes were funded via donations from volunteers, a common occurrence in Ukraine, where units have to crowdfund for drones and weapons.

“If you see a strange fundraiser for an e-bike, or a unicycle, don’t be surprised. Maybe it will save a life,” he said.

First-person-view, or FPV, drones have been used for many non-combat functions during the war, such as dropping small items on the battlefield or compelling soldiers to surrender via loudspeaker.

However, this marks one of the first times such a drone has been used to deliver a large asset like a vehicle during ongoing fighting. Given that the size of the payload may make a drone easier to spot while limiting its range, it’s unclear if this tactic will become more commonplace.

• Dario Amodei made one thing clear: Anthropic won’t join the Big Tech talent bidding war.
• Massive salary changes could “destroy” the company’s culture by treating people “unfairly,” he said.
• Employees turned down the offers — some “wouldn’t even talk to Mark Zuckerberg,” the CEO said.

When top engineers at Anthropic started receiving job offers from tech giants like Meta, Dario Amodei made one thing clear: The company wouldn’t play the bidding war game.

On the “Big Technology Podcast” published Wednesday, Anthropic’s CEO said he posted a message to staff declaring the company was “not willing to compromise our compensation principles, our principles of fairness” in response to outside offers.

He said Anthropic uses a level-based compensation system.

“When a candidate comes in, they get assigned a level, and we don’t negotiate that level,” Amodei said. “We think it’s unfair. We want to have a systematic way.”

“If Mark Zuckerberg throws a dart at a dartboard and hits your name, that doesn’t mean you should be paid 10 times more than the guy next to you who’s just as skilled,” he added.

Amodei said that such massive salary changes could “destroy” a company’s culture by treating people “unfairly.”

Many of his employees have rejected the outside offers, and some “wouldn’t even talk to Mark Zuckerberg,” he said.

“This was a unifying moment for the company where we didn’t give in,” Amodei said. “We refuse to compromise our principles because we have the confidence that people are at Anthropic because they truly believe in the mission.”

“What they are doing is trying to buy something that cannot be bought,” he added.

Mark Zuckerberg highlighted some of Meta’s new hires on Wednesday’s earnings call.

“We’re building an elite, talent-dense team,” Zuckerberg said. “I’ve spent a lot of time building this team this quarter.”

Meta and Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Bidding war for top AI talent

Amodei’s comments come as Big Tech companies are paying top dollar to recruit elite AI talent, a trend that’s likened to sports franchises competing for superstar athletes like Cristiano Ronaldo.

The competition reached another level when Meta recruited Scale’s CEO, Alexandr Wang, last month as part of a $14.3 billion deal to take a 49% stake in his company. Then, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said Meta had tried to poach his best employees with $100 million signing bonuses.

Just weeks ago, Google paid $2.4 billion to hire the CEO and top talent of AI startup Windsurf and license its intellectual property. OpenAI had planned to buy Windsurf for $3 billion, but the deal fell apart.

“It’s not a hard choice” for the team at Anthropic because “people here are so mission-oriented,” the startup’s cofounder, Benjamin Mann, said on a recent episode of “Lenny’s Podcast.”

Perplexity’s CEO, Aravind Srinivas, said on a recent episode of the podcast “Decoder” that Big Tech companies need to ensure that employees are motivated by mission as well as money.

“You’re encountering new kinds of challenges. You feel a lot of growth, you’re learning new things. And you’re getting richer, too, along the way. Why would you want to go just because you have some guaranteed payments?” he said.