NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Shield AI plans to have its Hivemind digital pilot work on three additional aircraft types next year, bringing the total to nine.
The California-based company has already bundled autonomous flight software into three classes of quadcopters, its own V-Bat drone, the F-16 fighter jet and Kratos’ MQM-178 Firejet drone.
Next up are two more Kratos products, the XQ-58 and BQM-177, according to Brandon Tseng, president of Shield AI. The company did not select a third candidate.
“We want to put our AI pilot on every plane under the sun. The V-Bat is fantastic for what it does, but we’re also aware that we’re not going to build every single aircraft,” Tseng told C4ISRNET on April 8 at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space conference. “We will work with any OEM that wants to play ball.”
The US Department of Defense is increasingly interested in the combination of artificial intelligence and unmanned technologies. Autonomous drones and remotely controlled machines can survey places deemed too dangerous for troops, aid in targeting and bring in additional firepower.
The department requested $1.8 billion for artificial intelligence in fiscal 2025 — the same amount as the year before. It also recently launched the Replicator initiative, which seeks to deploy thousands of biased systems to counter China’s perceived bulk.
Hivemind’s ability to integrate with different aircraft is a result of Shield AI’s “software infrastructure, design tools and pipelines,” Tseng said, describing it as the “secret sauce.”
“Google has invested billions of dollars in the Android operating system. “Tesla has invested billions of dollars in Tesla’s self-driving technology, which they put on a car-to-car basis,” he added. “We’ve invested a lot in the software ecosystem, where we can quickly deploy it on an aircraft-to-aircraft basis.”
Colin Demarest is a reporter for C4ISRNET, where he covers military networks, cyber and IT. Colin previously covered the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration — that is, Cold War cleanup and nuclear weapons development — for a daily newspaper in South Carolina. Colin is also an award-winning photographer.