Anduril Ghost Shark
A stealthy, modular extra-large autonomous underwater vehicle co-developed by Anduril and the Royal Australian Navy — designed for persistent ISR, strike, and payload delivery from shore or warships.
An extra-large autonomous underwater vehicle co-developed by Anduril and the Royal Australian Navy — a stealthy, modular platform for persistent ISR, strike, and payload delivery, built for mass production and distributed operations across the Indo-Pacific.
Overview
The Anduril Ghost Shark is an extra-large autonomous underwater vehicle (XL-AUV) designed and built in Australia through a co-development partnership between Anduril, the Royal Australian Navy (RAN), and the Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG). The system is engineered as a modular, free-flooding “mothership” that can carry sensors, effectors, and smaller uncrewed vehicles for long-endurance intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and strike missions. Its first prototype was unveiled in April 2024, and by early 2026 the vehicle had transitioned from a three-year prototyping sprint into a A$1.7 billion Program of Record for the RAN, with production ramping at Anduril’s purpose-built robotic factory in Sydney.
Development
Before any government contract was signed, Anduril acquired Boston-based AUV startup Dive Technologies in early 2022 to gain the Dive-LD line as a technical baseline. In May 2022 Australia and Anduril inked a three-year, three-prototype co-funded development agreement, embedding RAN personnel inside the company’s engineering processes, as The War Zone has detailed. The first prototype, “Alpha,” was unveiled in Sydney in April 2024 with sea trials already in progress, and all three prototypes were delivered ahead of schedule and on budget by 2025. On 10 September 2025 the Australian government converted the development partnership into a A$1.7 billion five-year Program of Record, and just seven weeks later the Sydney factory opened with the first production vehicle already off the line — ahead of schedule — and undergoing in-water acceptance testing in the factory’s custom test tank, according to Anduril.
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