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.
The first live missile shot from a US robotic wingman came ten months after first flight and ran on Anduril's own Lattice software, in the middle of a three-way autonomy contest the Air Force decides by summer 2027.
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.
The Pentagon quietly rewrote how it picks targets to let AI initiate actions under human watch, codifying a kill-chain shift already worth billions in drone and software contracts.
A US autonomy startup turns front-line performance in Ukraine into a European naval contract, as Poland fields a shipboard ISR drone built to fly through GPS denial.
The Air Force put its Collaborative Combat Aircraft into production four months early, handing a defense-tech challenger a marquee program that Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman bid for and lost.
At Eurosatory, the US firm Shield AI is courting Warsaw to produce its autonomous VTOL fighter, the kind of program a fragmented Europe has yet to fly after FCAS collapsed.
Venture funding for defense-tech startups hit $14.6 billion in five months of 2026, beating all of last year, with Anduril, Shield AI and Saronic taking most of it.
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.
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.
The Pentagon's Crucible 2 turns a $54.6 billion autonomy budget line into a contracted shoot-off, and the 25-firm roster shows who the Pentagon is betting on to fly the swarms.
Defense-tech venture funding hit a record $14.6 billion in the first five months of 2026, per Crunchbase. The companies drawing the biggest checks build what Ukraine's front increasingly runs on: cheap, mass-produced autonomy.
The order expands a drone Greece already uses to watch its Aegean islands, and brings Shield AI's Hivemind autonomy business to Athens.