Shield AI Co-Founder Brandon Tseng on Autonomous Aircraft, Hivemind Software, and the Pentagon's Autonomy Gap

Shield AI co-founder Brandon Tseng said the company's Hivemind AI pilot software now runs on more than 30 platforms and that widespread autonomous defense systems will likely arrive between 2040 and 2045.

Original report
warontherocks.com

Industry impact

The interview underscores a structural shift in defense procurement toward pairing autonomy software with low-cost unmanned hardware as an alternative to traditional expensive platforms.

Brandon Tseng, co-founder and president of Shield AI and a former Navy SEAL, said his company's strategy rests on combining AI software with hardware to build a durable edge in defense autonomy. He founded Shield AI in 2015 after being turned down by 30 investors; a year later 2 of 25 said yes. Tseng originally expected autonomous defense systems to become ubiquitous by 2035 but now estimates that milestone will arrive between 2040 and 2045, citing slower Pentagon procurement and investor appetite.

Shield AI's Hivemind AI pilot software has been integrated on more than 30 platforms across air, sea and land, including the company's own V-BAT, Anduril's YFQ-44A, Airbus helicopters and Ukrainian one-way attack drones. Tseng said it took three years to get an AI pilot flying on an F-16, the same integration on a Kratos Firejet took 120 days, and today two engineers can build and fly an AI pilot for a one-way attack drone in under two weeks. On hardware, he said the V-BAT performs missions previously assigned to the Predator drone at one-tenth the cost, while the X-BAT is designed for fighter and bomber missions at a fraction of comparable costs.

Tseng told Congress that autonomy is more important now than stealth or GPS satellites were when those technologies were introduced, though the Pentagon still allocates far less budget attention to software than hardware. He cited the loss of roughly 50 Predator drones since 2023, many to cheap mobile weapon systems, and said surveillance currently covers less than 10 percent of significant terrain in a warzone over a 24-hour period. Regarding Ukraine, he said operations there forced Shield AI to design for zero dependency on connectivity given constant GPS jamming and more than 200 Russian Shahed-class drone launches per day, and that Ukraine's domestically built tactical drones are effective at ranges up to roughly 30 kilometers.