U.S. Air Force Awards Contracts for AI-Piloted Combat Aircraft

U.S. Air Force announced the winners of contracts for the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program on June 18, 2026. The program funds production of software and hardware for semi-autonomous, AI-piloted aircraft.

General Atomics is producing the FQ-42 AI-piloted prototype. The company had already begun building FQ-42 aircraft ahead of the contract award. Mark Brinkley, a General Atomics spokesman, said the firm had accumulated almost 10 million flight hours on MQ-1 Predator drones and pioneered missiles launched from those aircraft 25 years earlier.

Collins Aerospace, an RTX business, received a production contract to supply Sidekick Collaborative Mission Autonomy software for the CCA Increment 1 program. An RTX Corp. spokesperson said the company is supporting integration and testing of the software on General Atomics’ FQ-42A platform.

Anduril was awarded a contract to deliver an initial set of production FQ-44 semi-autonomous fighter aircraft. Mark Shushnar, an Anduril vice president, stated that the production line at Arsenal-1 can deliver up to 150 aircraft per year in its current configuration.

Vik Pattabi, Anduril’s vice president of engineering, wrote that the company’s experience enables a single human operator to interact and fight with a team of CCA.

Shield AI was also named among the contractors. The company said its Hivemind software enables unmanned systems to sense, decide, and act independently. Douglas Birkey, executive director of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that humans should remain in the loop when kinetic force is used.

Timothy Walton, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said CCA aircraft should have lower operations and support costs than crewed fighters. Human Rights Watch stated on August 10, 2020, that weapons systems selecting and engaging targets without meaningful human control are unacceptable.