USAF Selects Anduril to Bring Mission Autonomy to Collaborative Combat Aircraft

June 17, 2026

Autonomy represents a step change — a total transformation in the history of military aviation. That change, however, isn’t just confined to the software that manages flight itself. Flight autonomy, the software that manages safety-critical functions like takeoff, keeping the wings level, flying waypoints, landing, and more, is critical, but combat operations demand more. Achieving the benefits of affordable mass also demands mission autonomy: the software that enables robots to work together collaboratively to execute complex missions in an even more complex battlespace.

These two novel technologies critical to robotic aviation — flight autonomy and mission autonomy — are reflected in how Anduril has designed its support for the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program. Since April 2024, the YFQ-44A air vehicle team at Anduril has developed, tested, and built prototype CCA along with the flight autonomy software that keeps them in the air. Separately, my team at Anduril has focused on transforming Anduril’s core Lattice software baseline into the definitive mission autonomy software stack for CCA missions, investing our own dollars to build this new capability. These parallel efforts are equally critical to rapidly unlocking a new era in airpower.

Now, we are bringing our mission autonomy work directly into the CCA program. Today, the United States Air Force selected Anduril’s Lattice for Mission Autonomy software stack for the next phase of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program. Under the contract, Anduril will work to move mission autonomy from concept to production-ready capability. We will expand and refine Lattice for Mission Autonomy, building on the capabilities that we have already demonstrated across multiple Lattice-powered flights of Increment 1 CCA. We will fly regularly, stressing the software across the full system envelope and full CCA mission profile. We will execute tests where operational users will directly oversee Lattice-powered mission autonomy flights, a critical step in building the trust with end users that is critical to actually fielding CCA rapidly and at scale.

Our journey to this contract milestone was not linear. In the process, we identified and worked through basic problems in our initial approach and executed a complete rebuild. We have won contracts and lost them. But now we’re back, and we believe that the lessons that we’ve learned in the process have set us up for success in the long term.

Those lessons and Anduril’s selection for further work validatethe Air Force’s emphasis on constant competition and modularity. By defining a universal Autonomy Government Reference Architecture (A-GRA) standard that ensures cross-compatibility between autonomy software and aircraft hardware, the Air Force has fostered an ecosystem of software suites that they can draw upon as aircraft and mission needs evolve. Today, Lattice for Mission Autonomy is fully A-GRA compliant, ensuring that it can be integrated not only with all Increment 1 CCA, but with the full spectrum of current and future A-GRA compliant aircraft. Through the A-GRA, the CCA program has established the foundation that will drive the development of a larger ecosystem of autonomous aircraft.

But to fully understand the direction that Anduril’s work on CCA mission autonomy software is going — and why our approach has improved — we must consider exactly what we’ve done, why we’ve changed course, and how we’ll apply our learnings to future competition.

Origins
Anduril has worked toward sophisticated Mission Autonomy from the early days of the company. Everything we build — from Sentry towers, to air defense systems, to launched effects, and more — sits squarely at the intersection between robotics and large-scale software deployments. 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.

By early 2025, we had already made significant progress on this task. We invested large quantities of capital in the core autonomy tools required to enable fast-moving aircraft to conduct air-to-air missions: simulation infrastructure, hundreds of surrogate flights, algorithm research and development, and much more. We also worked to understand the problem domain: formation flight, airspace management, tactics and techniques, and everything else required for CCA to fight operationally-relevant missions.

Still, we knew that we had much more work to do if we wanted to fly our mission autonomy stack on a CCA. We needed to improve and accelerate our approach to testing to ensure that our software stack would perform when it mattered most. We needed to be able to better explain and understand why our stack took each action during tests. And we needed to ensure that our stack behaved in a way that felt natural to pilots in uniform. We put a new plan in motion to systematically close these gaps. What ensued amounted to a foundational rebuild of our mission autonomy for air dominance product.

The rebuild
The work to rebuild mission autonomy for CCA rested on our foundational advantages. We already had a strong core engineering team focused on enabling mission autonomy for air dominance applications. They understood the CCA problem set, knew the customer, and were trusted to take our mission autonomy from zero to one. Building on that foundation, we quadrupled the team over the last year, adding software, simulation, UI, and infrastructure engineers and putting them alongside former fighter pilots and weapons school instructors with hundreds of years of combined operational experience.

In parallel, we invested heavily in the tooling and infrastructure that underpins our work, drawing lessons from more mature autonomy domains like commercial autonomous vehicles. We expanded our high-fidelity, faster-than-real-time simulation capabilities and automated testing pipelines, accelerating our development velocity and increasing our confidence in system performance ahead of flight testing.

We also recognized that technical performance alone would not determine success. Pilots must trust and understand their robotic wingmen. We worked closely with former operators to expand the supporting ecosystem around the autonomy stack, building mission planning, in-flight monitoring, and post-mission debrief tools designed to help human pilots understand why the CCA made the decisions it did.

Our internal rebuild effort moved in parallel with the Air Force’s CCA mission autonomy program, not as part of it. While we were directly involved in early phases of the Air Force’s program, we learned in mid-2025 that we had not been selected for the next stage of prototyping. The news was not entirely surprising to us: we knew when we started our rebuild process that our timeline might not align perfectly with the program’s schedule. The loss only galvanized our team and accelerated our internal investment. We were down, but far from out.

After a year of focused effort, our revamped mission autonomy stack flew YFQ-44A for the first time on February 24, 2026. In March, Lattice for Mission Autonomy flew on YFQ-44A again, for a more complex mission.

The way forward
Today’s announcement serves as validation of our internal rebuild effort. Getting to this point has been an exercise in what Anduril does best: invest our own capital, at risk, to take a committed swing on a critical problem, based on our conviction that it was the right problem to solve and that we had the right approach to solving it.

As we transition from one-off autonomy flights to regularly mission planning, flying, debriefing, and analyzing the performance of our autonomy across a fleet of airplanes, we will uncover new and significant challenges that we must address. Those are the challenges that we look forward to. In this problem space — as in every new engineering domain — the team that wins will be the one that is able to operate with focus, endurance, and hunger for excellence over a long period of time. There is no doubt that team is Anduril.

Source : Anduril Industries