Shield AI at Sea‑Air‑Space

Shield AI used the Sea-Air-Space expo to pitch a maritime autonomy stack built around its Hivemind software, its V-BAT surveillance drone, and its newer X-BAT aircraft concept. (shield.ai) Autonomy in this context means software that keeps an unmanned aircraft flying and completing tasks when radio links or satellite navigation are jammed. Shield AI says Hivemind has been operationally validated since 2019 and deployed on more than 15 platforms. (shield.ai) For ships and small expeditionary teams, the company’s most mature product is V-BAT, a vertical takeoff and landing drone built for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Shield AI says a two-person team can deploy it, it can fly for 13 or more hours, and it can launch and recover on decks as small as 4.6 by 4.6 meters. (shield.ai) That pitch lines up with recent government testing. The United States Coast Guard said on July 31, 2025 that V-BAT completed operational testing aboard cutters Midgett and Stone, with no critical operational issues identified ahead of planned installation across the national security cutter fleet and possibly other vessel classes. (uscg.mil) Shield AI also says V-BAT has deployed on nearly every class of United States Navy ship and with all seven Marine Expeditionary Units, making it the company’s clearest example of a drone already tied to sea service operations. The company won the Coast Guard’s Maritime Unmanned Aircraft System Services program in 2024. (shield.ai; prnewswire.com) The more ambitious part of the display is X-BAT, which Shield AI unveiled on October 22, 2025 as what it calls an artificial-intelligence-piloted vertical takeoff and landing fighter jet. On its website, the company says X-BAT is designed to launch from ships, remote islands, or austere forward bases without a runway. (shield.ai; shield.ai) Shield AI says X-BAT would carry air-to-air and air-to-surface weapons, fly more than 2,000 nautical miles, and operate in Global Positioning System- and communications-jammed environments. The company says first vertical takeoff and landing flights are scheduled for 2026, with mission capability targeted for 2028. (shield.ai) That timeline leaves X-BAT well behind V-BAT in maturity. Shield AI’s own materials describe wind-tunnel, pole, and engine testing completed so far, with a structural pathfinder in fabrication, while outside defense reporting has noted skepticism about how quickly any company can field a runway-independent, high-performance combat aircraft at that scale. (shield.ai; twz.com) The maritime angle has widened beyond aircraft. In September 2025, Shield AI and shipbuilder HII said they would combine Hivemind with HII’s Odyssey autonomy suite to build cross-domain autonomous systems, and HII later said the software had completed its first maritime deployment aboard a ROMULUS unmanned surface vessel. (hii.com; navalnews.com) So the Sea-Air-Space message was less about a single aircraft than about a layered offer: a fielded surveillance drone for ships now, autonomy software that can move across platforms, and a much larger combat aircraft that still has to prove it can fly on schedule. (shield.ai; shield.ai)