KYIV (Reuters) -U.S. defence company Auterion will provide 33,000 artificial intelligence guidance kits for Ukrainian drones, funded by a $50 million Pentagon contract, it said on Monday.

According to the company, the kits enable manually-piloted strike drones to autonomously track and hit targets up to a kilometre (0.62 mile) away.

Kyiv, which says it will purchase 4.5 million small First Person View drones throughout 2025, has been seeking ways to make them immune to the increasingly dense signal jamming deployed by both Ukraine and Russia.

Drones that use artificial intelligence to lock onto the shape of a target for the final part of a drone's flight are one of several solutions being deployed.

"We have previously shipped thousands of our AI strike systems to Ukraine, but this new deployment increases our support more than tenfold," Auterion CEO Lorenz Meier was quoted as saying in a company press release.

A Ukrainian official said last year Ukraine had dozens of AI-augmented systems for drone guidance.