If AI's hype has been punctured, I couldn't find a company willing to talk about it. A few weeks ago, I set out on what I thought would be a straightforward reporting journey. After years of momentum for AI--even if you didn't think it would be good for the world, you probably thought it was powerful enough to take seriously--hype for the technology had been slightly punctured. First there was the underwhelming release of GPT-5 in August. Then a report released two weeks later found that 95% of generative AI pilots were failing, which caused a brief stock market panic. I wanted to know: Which companies are spooked enough to scale back their AI spending?

Visit tech startup Skydio's headquarters on the San Francisco peninsula in California and you're likely to find flying robots buzzing on the roof overhead. Docking stations with motorised covers open to allow small drones that resemble the TIE fighters from Star Wars films to take off; when each drone lands back again, they close. The drones can fly completely autonomously and without GPS, taking in data from onboard cameras and using AI to execute programmed missions and avoid obstacles. Skydio, with more than 740m in venture capital funding and a valuation of about 2.5bn, makes drones for the military along with civilian organisations such as police forces and utility companies. The company moved away from the consumer market in 2020 and is now the largest US drone maker.

In what can only bode poorly for our species' survival during the inevitable robot uprisings, an AI system has once again outperformed the people who trained it. This time, researchers at the University of Zurich in partnership with Intel, pitted their "Swift" AI piloting system against a trio of world champion drone racers -- none of whom could best its top time. Swift is the culmination of years of AI and machine learning research by the University of Zurich. In 2021, the team set an earlier iteration of the flight control algorithm that used a series of external cameras to validate its position in space in real-time, against amateur human pilots, all of whom were easily overmatched in every lap of every race during the test. That result was a milestone in its own right as, previously, self-guided drones relied on simplified physics models to continually calculate their optimum trajectory, which severely lowered their top speed.

Passenger aircraft with AI co-pilots could be flying travellers to their destinations in the future, says Tim Clark, president of airline Emirates. He told CNBC: 'You might see a one-pilot aircraft. Could the aircraft be flown on a fully automated basis? Yes it could, technology is right up there now. '[But passengers] like to think there are two pilots up there.

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI) has flown live, tactical, air combat maneuvers using AI pilots to control a company-owned MQ-20 Avenger UAS. Collaborative maneuvers between human and AI pilots were conducted using GA-ASI's Live, Virtual, Constructive (LVC) collaborative combat aircraft ecosystem over a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) SATCOM provider's IP-based Mission Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) datalink. The LEO SATCOM connection was also used to rapidly retrain and redeploy AI pilots while the aircraft was airborne, demonstrating GA-ASI's ability to update AI pilots within minutes. This marks the first deployment of an LEO SATCOM provider connections running on an operationally relevant unmanned combat aerial vehicle platform. The team used two L3Harris Technologies RASOR Multi-Functional Processors (MFPs) – one that housed the transceiver card and another that controlled the BVLOS Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA).

Move over, Maverick: artificial intelligence (AI) may soon be the next hot fighter jock in the skies. An AI agent recently flew Lockheed Martin's VISTA X-62A for more than 17 hours at the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School (USAF TPS) at Edwards Air Force Base in California--the first time AI was used on a tactical aircraft. The experimental training aircraft is expected to lay the groundwork for a coming wave of jets piloted entirely by computers. The VISTA, developed by Lockheed's Skunk Works and Calspan Corporation, is fitted with software that allows it to mimic the performance characteristics of other aircraft. The test plane is a modified F-16D Block 30 Peace Marble Il aircraft upgraded with Block 40 avionics.

We propose developing an integrated system to keep autonomous unmanned aircraft safely separated and behave as expected in conjunction with manned traffic. The main goal is to achieve safe manned-unmanned vehicle teaming to improve system performance, have each (robot/human) teammate learn from each other in various aircraft operations, and reduce the manning needs of manned aircraft. The proposed system anticipates and reacts to other aircraft using natural language instructions and can serve as a co-pilot or operate entirely autonomously. We point out the main technical challenges where improvements on current state-of-the-art are needed to enable Visual Flight Rules to fully autonomous aerial operations, bringing insights to these critical areas. Furthermore, we present an interactive demonstration in a prototypical scenario with one AI pilot and one human pilot sharing the same terminal airspace, interacting with each other using language, and landing safely on the same runway. We also show a demonstration of a vision-only aircraft detection system.

A team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University believe they have developed the first AI pilot that enables autonomous aircraft to navigate a crowded airspace. The artificial intelligence can safely avoid collisions, predict the intent of other aircraft, track aircraft and coordinate with their actions, and communicate over the radio with pilots and air traffic controllers. The researchers aim to develop the AI so the behaviors of their system will be indistinguishable from those of a human pilot. "We believe we could eventually pass the Turing Test," said Jean Oh, an associate research professor at CMU's Robotics Institute (RI) and a member of the AI pilot team, referring to the test of an AI's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to a human. To interact with other aircraft as a human pilot would, the AI uses both vision and natural language to communicate its intent with other aircraft, whether piloted or not.

Air Force fighter pilots will soon face new opponents in their training: artificial intelligence-based enemy pilots that can match humans based on their personal learning needs. After steering the production of numerous AI-enabled pilot agents for years, Aptima, Inc. confirmed it landed a four-year contract with the Air Force Research Laboratory to build an "automated librarian" that will categorize those AI pilots and pair them with military trainees in scenarios that are right to advance their skillsets. "The best case outcome is that AFRL determines that the products of this research are so promising that they create a library into which AI training technologies are shelved like books are shelved and they refine the sort of librarian that we're trying to build here so that it can sweep through that enormous library of AI, sweep through a library of scenarios--and for each individual student--pick out just the right pairing to advance them to expertise reliably and more quickly than we can do today," Aptima's Chief Scientist Jared Freeman told Nextgov during an interview on Tuesday. Freeman joined the company in 1999, four years after its launch. Aptima's project portfolio has grown increasingly diverse since then, he noted. Now, much of it concerns AI support for human teams, like forming and measuring them, and helping people and AI to manage those groups.

Shield AI announced on 22 July that it has acquired Heron Systems, bringing together two US software companies that are developing artificial intelligence (AI) pilots for military aviation. "Together, Shield AI and Heron will accelerate the deployment of advanced AI pilots to legacy and future military aircraft – an urgent and necessary step towards achieving national security priorities and remaining credible in the face of sophisticated peer countries," the announcement says. Heron Systems made headlines last year when its AI software defeated a human US Air Force F-16 pilot 5-0, and five other AI pilots, during the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA's) AlphaDogfight Trials. "Heron has developed the most advanced AI pilot for fighter aircraft in the United States," Shield AI co-founder and CEO Ryan Tseng said. Heron general manager Brett Darcey said that joining a larger company like Shield AI will provide "the opportunity and scale to accelerate the integration of our AI pilot on a next-generation fighter" and unmanned aircraft systems (UASs).