Shield AI has announced its selection as a mission autonomy provider supporting the US Air Force Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program.
“Shield AI is proud to be named a mission autonomy provider supporting the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program,” CEO of Shield AI, Gary Steele, said.
“The Air Force is moving with urgency to explore how autonomy can reshape air combat, and we have spent years preparing for this—building, testing, and flying mission autonomy in the real world. We will work relentlessly to deliver and to help advance the next era of airpower alongside the Air Force and its industry partners.”
Shield AI was selected following a competitive evaluation to support mission autonomy Technology Maturity and Risk Reduction (TMRR) efforts for the program.
“Delivering mission autonomy in real-world combat conditions is hard, which is why Shield AI has spent more than a decade building Hivemind and the technical and operational foundation to do it right,” Vice President of Hivemind Solutions at Shield AI, Christian Gutierrez, stated.
“Our team brings proven experience fielding mission-critical autonomy on complex weapon systems, deep operational understanding across domains, and a development model built for speed. We value the opportunity to work with the U.S. Air Force on the future of mission autonomy.”
Under the program, Shield AI’s Hivemind autonomy software has successfully integrated on Anduril’s Fury (YFQ-44A) aircraft and is supporting system-level testing in preparation for flight demonstrations expected in the coming months.
Hivemind is Shield AI’s core artificial intelligence software that allegedly assumes the role of a human pilot or operator, enabling unmanned defence systems to sense, decide, and act.
According to the company, Hivemind is Autonomy Government Reference Architecture (A-GRA) compliant, platform-agnostic, and has demonstrated A-GRA-aligned autonomy across multiple government and industry test efforts, including work with General Atomics’ MQ-20 Avenger, Northrop Grumman’s Talon IQ autonomous ecosystem, US Navy BQM-177 test aircraft, and the Airbus UH-72A Lakota helicopter.
The US Air Force have implemented the government-owned A-GRA across multiple vendor platforms to accelerate its CCA program.
“Verifying A-GRA across multiple partners is critical to our acquisition strategy,” Portfolio Acquisition executive for Fighters and Advanced Aircraft, Col. Timothy Helfrich, highlighted.
“It proves that we are not locked into a single solution or a single vendor. We are instead building a competitive ecosystem where the best algorithms can be deployed rapidly to the warfighter on any A-GRA compliant platform, regardless of the vendor providing the algorithm."
The A-GRA is a Modular Open System Approach, which has been designed to prevent "vendor lock" by establishing a universal standard for mission autonomy. This has allowed the US Air Force to rapidly onboard new software and algorithms from a diverse range of traditional and non-traditional industry partners.