Shield AI is matching a $150 million Navy award that pays to make its AI-piloted, runway-free fighter exportable, lifting X-BAT commitments to $400 million before its first flight test.
Shield AI has fixed the factory and flight-test sites for its runway-independent AI-piloted fighter, which has yet to fly and whose production dates do not yet line up.
The retrofit moves Hivemind beyond Shield AI aircraft, but five virtual satellites show how far the demonstration remains from autonomous fleet operations.
An expanded contract gives NCSIST the ability to build AI pilots locally for drones that can keep operating when electronic warfare breaks the operator link.
American autonomy software already drives Taiwanese sea drones. The NT$210 billion that would buy the fleet is stuck in cross-party talks, and the opposition's fallback caps spending at NT$40 billion a year.
A US Army-supported flight on July 16 put autonomous spectrum warfare in the air for the first time, pairing a prime's jamming stack with the AI pilot slated to fly the X-BAT fighter.
Shield AI's X-BAT is a runway-independent, tail-sitting VTOL autonomous combat jet flown by the company's Hivemind AI pilot — a claimed 3,700+ km range from a trailer launcher, no runway required, with first flight planned for late 2026 and a production pitch to Poland.
A CBS News report from Kyiv details how Shield AI's V-BAT reconnaissance drone finds targets for the Ukrainian strike campaign that has hit dozens of Russian tankers and left Crimea rationing fuel.
Shield AI's ducted-fan VTOL tail-sitter – a runway-independent ISR and targeting drone that proved it can operate deep inside Russian electronic warfare and cue precision fires for Ukrainian forces.
Shield AI says one AI flew a V-BAT and Destinus Hornet drones as a single team in Oklahoma, a milestone arriving days after a Reuters investigation into V-BAT crashes and a whistleblower's claims about its autonomy.
The order expands a drone Greece already uses to watch its Aegean islands, and brings Shield AI's Hivemind autonomy business to Athens.