Anduril Is Quietly Building the Future of Maritime Warfare
Most defence tech is built for yesterday’s wars. Anduril isn’t waiting around.
Anduril, best known for moving fast in a world of entrenched contractors, just unveiled two new systems aimed squarely at reshaping underwater warfare: Seabed Sentry and Copperhead.
Seabed Sentry is a network of mobile, AI-enabled undersea sensors designed for long-term deployment. These nodes aren’t passive or static—they’re built to move, adapt, and communicate. Operating at depths beyond 500 meters for months or even years, they provide real-time situational awareness in places where current systems go blind. Each unit has onboard compute, can host 0.5 m³ of payload, and links directly into autonomous kill chains, giving commanders eyes and ears where traditional platforms can’t go.
Copperhead goes a step further. It’s a new family of high-speed Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), including Copperhead-M, the first torpedo capability designed to be carried and deployed by autonomous systems. This isn’t a retrofit of Cold War-era weapons—it’s a purpose-built response to today’s demand for scalable, unmanned seapower.
Legacy torpedoes are expensive, tightly coupled to nuclear subs, and slow to manufacture. Copperhead-M breaks that mould. It enables autonomous systems like Anduril’s Dive-XL to carry dozens of small, fast, and software-defined torpedoes. These vehicles can patrol contested waters and respond in real-time without risking high-value assets. Meanwhile, non-munition variants like Copperhead-100 and 500 support missions like infrastructure inspection, search and rescue, and environmental monitoring, offering speeds over 30 knots and flexible payload options.
Together, Seabed Sentry and Copperhead show what a modern defence startup can do when it applies a product mindset to military tech. Anduril doesn’t just build weapons—it builds modular platforms that work together across subsea, surface, and air domains. That means faster iteration, smarter targeting, and systems designed to operate autonomously at scale.
In a space dominated by aging supply chains and slow development cycles, Anduril is proving that a nimble approach can lead. These systems aren’t theoretical. They’re deployable, networked, and ready to shift how maritime power is projected.
