2 AI-PILOTED FIGHTER DRONES enter production for the US

[00:00:00]It's official. The world's first two operational artificial intelligence piloted drone fighters will be American, and there's going to be two different kinds of them. On Wednesday afternoon, the US Air Force announced that it would not be choosing between the two AI piloted drone fighters that they currently have in testing, and instead they're going to put both of these advanced jets into operational service.

[00:00:24]With low rate initial production already underway for both of these drone wingmen known officially as collaborative combat aircraft, that means Anderil's YFQ44 Fury will soon become the operational FQ44, while General Atomics YFQ42 Dark Merlin will become the operational FQ42.

[00:00:48]Now in this context that F prefix stands for fighter meaning these aircraft were designed specifically for air-to-air combat while the Q prefix indicates that the platforms are uncrrewed. Now, these two drone fighter designs were selected for testing as part of increment one of the Air Force's collaborative combat aircraft or CCA program with their focus set squarely on delivering proven capabilities quickly and in volume especially for the air-to-air combat mission. While subsequent increments of the CCA program will be selected to fill other specialized mission sets like airto ground operations, electronic warfare, and more. Now, the forthcoming FQ42 builds off of literally decades worth of drone experience from General Atomics. the company behind legendary platforms like the MQ1 Predator, the MQ9 Reaper, and the stealthy jet powered MQ20 Avenger, not to mention lesserk known experimental platforms like their XQ67 offboard sensing station that they built for the Air Force Research Lab.

[00:01:58]Now, the first production representative prototype of the YFQ42 Dark Merlin took flight in August of 2025, and since then, several more have been built and added to the flight testing regime, though one did crash in April. And new FQ44 is a much smaller aircraft overall with a wingspan that's only about half the size of the Dark Merlin. Now, this fighter drone actually started its development process as an aggressor drone designed to simulate the air combat capabilities of top tier adversary jets like China's J20 and Russia's SU57 for American pilots to train against. But in 2023, Anderl purchased the firm developing Fury Blue Force Technologies and transitioned its focus away from pretending to be a bad guy and instead toward shooting them down. Now, the first production representative prototype of Fury took flight on Halloween Day of 2025. Now, both of these drones were developed specifically to fly under the control of any third-party autonomy software designed to meet the autonomy government reference architecture requirements. In other words, the Pentagon has separated the hardware or aircraft from the software or artificial intelligence with six vendors also chosen to continue developing the AI that will pilot these jets. Now those vendors are Anderoll and General Atomics, Loheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, RTX Collins Aerospace and Shield AI. Many of whom also have their own CCA fighter drone designs and development or already in testing and squaring off for further increments of that CCA pool of money. Now, the Air Force will ultimately choose one artificial intelligence pilot, or agent, as they're called, to permanently fly these fighter drones in the summer of 2027, with these autonomous war fighters expected to enter operational service shortly thereafter. And as the AI autonomy systems continue to mature thanks to compounding training hours and software improvements, we will not only see those new AI agents integrated into future CCA increments, but we will all but certainly see increment one jets upgraded with that more modern software, which is one of the real benefits of this split hardware and software approach. In other words, however capable these AI piloted fighters may be when they enter service as soon as next year, they will only get more capable as time goes on.