Anduril notched two wins in the same week: Hermeus tapped its autonomy software to fly the Quarterhorse hypersonic drone, while rival General Atomics saw its Dark Merlin combat drone crash in the California desert. The mishap hands Anduril further advantage in the Pentagon's contest to build AI-piloted fighter wingmen.
Skydio pushed its multi-drone detect-and-rescue technology further, adding coordinated swarm operations meant to let police and first responders manage fleets of drones at once. But the ambition collided with reality this week when a cloud service outage exposed just how much of that autonomy depends on infrastructure Skydio doesn't fully control, raising questions about resilience as the company races to scale.