Navigating the black box: Operational lenses for AI-enabled drone governance

Drones equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) now deliver medical supplies in remote regions, monitor environmental changes, and conduct military operations. Worldwide, regulators are racing to layer broad AI rules with drone-specific safety standards; however, the resulting patchwork is still fragmented and unevenly enforced. As AI decision-making processes are often opaque, governance approaches that rely on understanding internal system mechanics face significant challenges. In this review, we examine the existing governance landscape on AI-enabled drones and demonstrate why drones that share identical hardware and AI architecture raise different ethical and legal questions depending on their deployment context. By focusing on how missions are structured and what operational complexities they entail, and not on how AI systems reach decisions, our analysis offers conceptual lenses for policy development that acknowledge the reality of governing black-box systems. These qualitative and heuristic frameworks are designed to provide policymakers with a common vocabulary for analysis rather than offer prescriptive solutions.