Pilots are expensive and fragile, so we made this mad murder machine to safely rain hellfire on a budget... bonus: non-stop terror as sleep and potty breaks are no longer required!
It was also the plot of the Terminator series of films. Well, except for the detail that the AI controlling the aircraft (called "Skynet") became "self aware" and that is what caused it to launch all the nukes to kill all the humans.
So how it differ from Terminator's "Skynet" is that these real life AI are being controlled by genocidal maniacs (the largest concentration of whom seem to live in the US and Israel at present) and they are setting these things to "auto-kill" mode, like what happened in Gaza recently. And the genocidal maniacs gleefully ignore international law, saying "you want to stop me, you and what army?" So who is to keep them from turning the robots against you and me?
According to the story told by Schwarzenneger's character in part 2, Skynet started out controlling only in US Air Force drones (hence the name), and was soon after connected to everything else. Eventually human decision making was removed from the control of the system.
This was a plot of a lot of movies. And TV shows. Most famously, The Terminator (1980).
But that movie was really bad, lol. I remember renting it from blockbuster one weekend when I was really stoned and they were out of the movie I wanted to see. God, I really don’t miss blockbuster video.
So we are giving freeway to AI to kill humans now? Came faster than expected. Next step, Boston Dynamics is allowed to regularte crime in the streets of Detroit...