Helsing today confirmed the existence of Project Centaur, its large-scale AI initiative to develop autonomous air combat capabilities for existing platforms and future systems such as Loyal Wingman, FCAS, GCAP and other advanced air combat programmes across Europe.

Project Centaur takes a clean-slate approach to achieving next-generation autonomous flight and combat capabilities, combining at-scale reinforcement learning and foundation models for unprecedented performance and collaborative abilities.

“Autonomous air combat is a challenging and fascinating AI problem”, said Antoine Bordes, VP of Artificial Intelligence at Helsing. “By using an end-to-end approach, we take the learnings of recent AI breakthroughs and scale them to the air domain. I am thrilled by the progress we have already made on this path, and by the reaction of human pilots encountering the Centaur AI.”

“To stay ahead in air combat, Europe needs to invest in developing capable and safe uncrewed systems”, said Gundbert Scherf, Co-founder and Co-CEO of Helsing. “After extremely encouraging early results, Helsing has decided to commit significant resources to training and developing this new generation of artificial intelligence for existing and future air combat systems. By employing modern AI approaches we are creating the foundation for significant capability leaps – but, crucially, applied to the specifics of the military domain.”

Project Centaur is in advanced development at Helsing. The company will be demonstrating its Centaur AI pilots to selected audiences over the coming months.