(DCNF)—The U.S. Air Force is pushing the envelope on AI-based weapons with new unmanned fighter jets.
The Air Force announced that it selected the winners of contracts for the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, responsible for producing software and hardware to push the AI revolution from the ground and into the sky with new airframes, in a press release on Wednesday. The initiative is being unveiled as the U.S. engages in an AI arms race with China.
One AI-piloted prototype aircraft is the FQ-42, made by General Atomics. A General Atomics spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation that drones are its bread and butter.
“Twenty-five years ago, General Atomics changed combat forever by pioneering missiles launched from MQ-1 Predators,” Mark Brinkley, a General Atomics spokesman, told the DCNF. “No other nation had that capability. Almost 10 million flight hours later, we’re changing combat again with CCA [Collaborative Combat Aircraft]. Unmanned aircraft is all we do, and we do it extremely well.”
Some experts have raised concerns about the ethics of having machines use lethal force on human beings.
“Humans should be in the loop when use of kinetic force is in play. AQI can really help process mass quantities of data, help see patterns,” Douglas Birkey, executive director of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, told the DCNF. “But the ultimate decision to employ a missile or shoot should involve a trained person—their judgment is crucial.”
“Weapons systems that select and engage targets without meaningful human control are unacceptable and need to be prevented,” Human Rights Watch, an international human rights advocacy group, warned on Aug. 10, 2020.
The U.S. Air Force did not comment in time for publication.
General Atomics said that these jets were already on the production line before the company was awarded the contract, which is funded by the U.S. defense budget.
“For CCA, we were already building aircraft ahead of contract award. Those jets are in the pipeline, suppliers have contracts, and work is underway already,” Brinkley told the DCNF. “We build a lot of things at risk, ahead of contracts, to save time for our customers and keep programs on track. We don’t have a scaling issue that you might associate with a new program or a startup company, because we’ve been doing this a long time. We have capacity and we forecast really well. So by having General Atomics in the mix, America gets a stable, nontraditional defense business but also gets real experience.”
Proponents of AI-piloted aircraft in military applications say this new initiative could actually end up saving the U.S. Air Force money in the long run.
“CCA can help commanders generate more options to sense and engage threats,” senior fellow at Hudson Institute Timothy Walton told the DCNF. “Additionally, they should have significantly lower operations and support costs compared to crewed fighters.”
General Atomics’ FQ-42 may be powered by software from Collins Aerospace, showing how intercompany cooperation is a key aspect of the new CCA initiative.
“Collins Aerospace, an RTX business, has been awarded a production contract by the U.S. Air Force to supply our Sidekick Collaborative Mission Autonomy software for the CCA Increment 1 program,” an RTX Corp. spokesperson told the DCNF. “We’re supporting integration and testing on General Atomics’ FQ-42A platform today”
“Separating mission autonomy from aircraft hardware not only helps prevent contractor lock-in, but also speeds development and iteration of both mission autonomy software and aircraft hardware,” Walton told the DCNF.
Anduril, an AI-focused weapons manufacturer, was awarded a contract to “deliver an initial set of production FQ-44 semi-autonomous fighter aircraft.”
The FQ-44’s development has an emphasis on mass production, Anduril said in a blog post announcing the contract.
“A handful of aircraft will not move the needle in a great power conflict. From the design of the aircraft itself to the production system that will deliver it, we have maintained a relentless focus on the need to deliver at scale,” Anduril Vice President Mark Shushnar wrote in the blog post. “The production line at Arsenal-1 is already on this path: work there is active today, and the production line itself is capable of delivering up to 150 aircraft per year in its current configuration … [Anduril can] scale it further to meet additional surges in demand.”
Not everyone is excited about what this means for the future.
“I agree with the large number of experts that have recommended the prohibition of lethal autonomous weapons without human control,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said on July 18, 2023, during remarks to the U.N. Security Council on Artificial Intelligence.
Human Rights Watch also asked British computer scientist Stuart Russell to support a ban on AI weapons in 2022.
Hardware Isn’t Everything
Although it is some awesome eye candy to look at, hardware is only half the battle when it comes to AI-piloted combat aircraft.
Anduril was awarded a contract as one of the key developers to push “Mission Autonomy” into the U.S. Air Force. In this case, mission autonomy means the ability to operate independently from humans in the event that electronic warfare jams communications with the aircraft.
“Anduril has worked toward sophisticated Mission Autonomy from the early days of the company,” Vice President of Engineering Vik Pattabi wrote in a blog on Wednesday. “Our experience on these programs created the foundational understanding required for us to take on a particularly advanced, complex, and high-stakes mission set: enabling a single human operator to interact and fight with a team of Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA).”
Anduril is not the only provider of AI-powered combat in the new CCA contract awards. Shield AI was also named among the contractors that will be building out the AI ecosystem in the U.S. Air Force.
Shield AI said Hivemind, its AI program, will be able to make decisions on its own.
“Hivemind is Shield AI’s … software that assumes the role of a human pilot or operator, enabling unmanned systems to sense, decide, and act,” Shield AI said in a statement provided to the DCNF. “Unlike traditional autopilots that simply follow preplanned routes, Hivemind can reroute around or engage dynamic obstacles, execute collaborative tactics with peer systems and piloted aircraft, respond to unexpected conditions, and complete missions safely and effectively as part of a human-machine team.”
With the award of these contracts, only one thing is certain: air combat is rapidly changing.
“The advantage is that crewed and uncrewed aircraft each have respective strengths and weaknesses,” Birkey told the DCNF. “Combining them allows for the strengths of one to cover for the weaknesses of the other. We saw a basic form of this during Operation Epic Fury, when uninhabited MQ-9s were put into threat zones where we did not want to put crewed aircraft at risk.”
While these new developments may save money for the U.S. military, the question of whether we should allow AI weapon development to continue remains unanswered.
At the outset of the Iran War, the U.S. military struck an Iranian girl’s school that killed at least 175 people, many of whom were schoolgirls, The New York Times reported. A final investigation into the incident has yet to be released and it remains unclear if AI was utilized at all in the strike. But a preliminary investigation found that “outdated” data led to the school being mistakenly targeted.
“Was there an AI program that targeted this school that thought it was something else? ” conservative commentator Tucker Carlson asked on “The Tucker Carlson Show” on March 9, 2026.
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