SAN DIEGO (August 21, 2024) – Shield AI, Inc., the technology company building the world’s best AI pilot, completed a major milestone on the path towards its overarching goal of providing autonomy for the world by successfully demonstrating its first-ever multi-jet autonomy flights on two Kratos MQM-178 Firejets.
The flight tests featured two autonomous agents piloted by Shield AI’s ‘Hivemind’ AI Pilot. These agents teamed up to perform coordinated maneuvers, demonstrating operationally relevant collaborative behaviors. This demonstration highlighted the capabilities of future unmanned jets and drones, with all computing executed on board and in-air agent communication seamlessly integrated.
“In the next decade, AI pilots will command and maneuver all unmanned systems, enabling the US and our allies to deploy millions of intelligent, resilient drones,” said Brandon Tseng, Shield AI’s President, Co-founder and a former Navy SEAL. “These Firejet flight tests represent a key milestone on our journey to bring autonomy to the world. What’s awesome is that the algorithms are not limited to the number of aircraft. For test objectives and budgetary reasons, we limited the number of Firejets to 2, but it could have been 4, 8, 16, 32, and so on.”
This builds on multiple AI-piloted Firejet flight tests completed earlier this year, which marked the sixth aircraft to be flown by Shield AI’s Hivemind AI Pilot. In June, the team completed its inaugural Live Virtual Constructive (LVC) integration, which bridges live platforms with virtual environments and enables dynamic interactions across different domains.
About Shield AI
Founded in 2015, Shield AI is a venture-backed defense technology company whose mission is to protect service members and civilians with intelligent systems. In pursuit of this mission, Shield AI is building the world’s best AI pilot. Its AI pilot, Hivemind, has flown jets (F-16; MQM-178 Firejet), a vertical takeoff and landing drone (MQ-35 V-BAT), and three quadcopters (Nova, Nova 2, iPRD). The company has offices in San Diego, Dallas, Washington DC and abroad. Shield AI’s products and people are currently in the field actively supporting operations with the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. allies. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X and Instagram.
About Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, Inc.
Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ: KTOS) is a technology, products, system and software company addressing the defense, national security, and commercial markets. Kratos makes true internally funded research, development, capital and other investments, to rapidly develop, produce and field solutions that address our customers’ mission critical needs and requirements. At Kratos, affordability is a technology, and we seek to utilize proven, leading-edge approaches and technology, not unproven bleeding edge approaches or technology, with Kratos’ approach designed to reduce cost, schedule and risk, enabling us to be first to market with cost effective solutions. We believe that Kratos is known as an innovative disruptive change agent in the industry, a company that is an expert in designing products and systems up front for successful rapid, large quantity, low-cost future manufacturing which is a value add competitive differentiator for our large traditional prime system integrator partners and also to our government and commercial customers. Kratos intends to pursue program and contract opportunities as the prime or lead contractor when we believe that our probability of win (PWin) is high and any investment required by Kratos is within our capital resource comfort level. We intend to partner and team with a large, traditional system integrator when our assessment of PWin is greater or required investment is beyond Kratos comfort level. Kratos primary business areas include virtualized ground systems for satellites and space vehicles including software for command & control (C2) and telemetry, tracking and control (TT&C), jet powered unmanned aerial drone systems, hypersonic vehicles and rocket systems, propulsion systems for drones, missiles, loitering munitions, supersonic systems, space craft and launch systems, C5ISR and microwave electronic products for missile, radar, missile defense, space, satellite, counter UAS, directed energy, communication and other systems, and virtual & augmented reality training systems for the warfighter. For more information, visit www.KratosDefense.com.
Media Contacts:
Lily Hinz, Media@shield.ai
Claire Burghoff, claire.burghoff@kratosdefense.com
