Anduril Executive Chairman and co-founder Trae Stephens details the shift in military strategy towards mass-produced, low-cost autonomous drones and AI-driven systems on ‘Mornings with Maria.’
Swarms of low-cost Iranian drones are rewriting the rules of war, but one U.S. defense contractor says it can mass-produce autonomous military systems to match them at a fraction of the traditional cost.
“Our adversaries are not coming at us with $10-plus million fighter planes, necessarily. They’re coming at us with very, very low-cost munitions,” Trae Stephens, co-founder and executive chairman of Anduril Industries, told “Mornings with Maria” Tuesday.
The challenge, he said, is to “significantly” bring down the cost of engagement instead of firing off $2 million interceptors, noting that the company is doing so by “building… low-cost autonomous systems” that give U.S. forces the ability to “fight the wars of tomorrow, rather than the wars of yesterday.”
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A solider checks an Anduril Industries Inc. Ghost-X reconnaissance drone at the National Training Center (NTC) in Fort Irwin, Calif., on Nov. 7, 2025. (Christopher Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“That’s been Anduril’s focus since the beginning…” he said.
Stephens detailed the company’s autonomous systems designed to collaborate on the battlefield. Some drones act as “hunters” that scout and identify targets, while others serve as “killers” capable of striking them.
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“You have drones that are going out and looking for other things, like our Ghost platform. You have loitering munitions that fly around looking for things, and then when they find those things, they can go and take kinetic action against them, and then you have platforms like our Barracuda 500 that are… missiles that are intended to go after targets directly,” he explained.
The aim is to replace Cold War-era technology with low-cost autonomous systems that can be mass-produced.
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“We’re leveraging the advances in manufacturing techniques, the advances and autonomy in the manufacturing system to produce at high, high scale at very low cost,” he said.
The company is already moving to scale up production, with a new manufacturing facility in Ohio set to produce these autonomous military systems at high volume as wartime demand grows.
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