Shield AI's V-BAT crashed more than 50 times as it scaled its $13B autonomy bet

A Reuters investigation ties the combat-proven drone now sold to Ukraine, Greece and the US Coast Guard to a run of crashes, a severed-fingers injury, and a whistleblower who says the company buried the failures.

Shield AI's V-BAT drone has crashed more than 50 times in the past 18 months, Reuters reported, in an investigation built on 21 former employees, executives and investors plus a whistleblower complaint and a lawsuit. More than 50 of about 200 upgraded V-BATs in the company's own fleet were destroyed in testing or training, two people told the agency.

The trigger was an injury. On May 12, a Romanian Navy official's hand was caught in a V-BAT propeller during a Shield AI exercise on a boat off the Texas coast, severing two fingers and fracturing a third, Romania's defense ministry told Reuters. She was moved to Walter Reed and remained there as of May 25. It was the second such mutilation. A US Navy official lost fingers to a V-BAT propeller a year earlier, after which Shield AI said it had fixed the problem with new landing gear and warning stickers.

The drone costs about $1 million and is combat-used in Ukraine. Shield AI was valued at $12.7 billion in a March round co-led by JPMorgan, and pitches itself as the startup rearming the Pentagon as wars run in Ukraine and the Middle East. It says the V-BAT is "one of the most operationally proven VTOL aircraft in service today," with 18,000 flight hours, and blamed the May 12 injury on "a violation of established safety procedures, not from a product defect."

The whistleblower goes further. Former product manager Jacob Miller, who sued in May alleging he was fired for raising air-safety concerns, says Shield AI scrubbed crash data to win contracts and once told the Greek military a V-BAT was flying autonomously when a pilot held the controls, Benzinga and Reuters reported. In July, a Cessna carrying an employee and his child took evasive action after a V-BAT failed to detect it. Shield AI called the claims meritless.

The exposure runs forward. Shield AI is now marketing the X-BAT, a roughly $30 million "loyal wingman" meant to fly beside fighter jets, and has won an early Pentagon Defense Innovation Unit award for it. The X-BAT flies on the same flight controls as the V-BAT.