YFQ-42 AI-enabled drone crashes for the first time during testing

One of America’s new AI-enabled drone fighters has reportedly crashed in testing for the first time. Last night, General Atomics, the drone’s manufacturer, sent out a press release outlining the crash of one of their production-representative prototype YFQ-42 Dark Merlin drone fighters shortly after takeoff.

This drone fighter is one of several Dark Merlins currently in testing for the U.S. Air Force’s Increment One Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or CCA, drone contract.

The YFQ-42 Dark Merlin is competing against Anduril’s YFQ-44 Fury for, what may ultimately be, an order of several hundred air-to-air combat focused drone wingmen. These will be piloted by AI autonomy systems already in testing, and fly alongside advanced fighters like upgraded F-35s and the forthcoming Boeing F-47 air superiority fighter. However, the first jet to be given the operational hardware necessary to take these drone wingmen into the fight will be the F-22 Raptor.

As of this article being published, there’s no word about what exactly caused the crash.

These platforms currently carry only semi-autonomous flight-control systems, effectively allowing them to taxi, take-off, fly to established coordinates, and return to land on their own – but they do not have fully fledged AI agents operating them yet.

Those AI agents are currently being matured in a variety of testing environments. (The most advanced of these agents most likely hails from the U.S. Air Force Research Lab’s Skyborg program, which has already added an AI pilot to one heavily modified F-16, and is currently installing AI-control hardware into six more fully combat-coded F-16 Fighting Falcons as a part of Project VENOM.)

For three years now, these AI agents have already been flying real air combat exercises in real aircraft, often against human fighter pilots, as they mature toward operational service.

The YFQ-42 was the first production representative prototype to fly from the Air Force’s CCA effort, making its airborne debut in August 2025. Since then, the aircraft has flown under the control of multiple autonomy suites provided by different vendors, including Shield AI’s Hivemind and Anduril’s Lattice; this is done to prevent the Air Force from being dependent on one company for software updates or upgrades down the line.

Both General Atomics’ YFQ-42 and Anduril’s YFQ-44 have already entered low-rate initial production, which suggests the Air Force may ultimately buy some number of each. Several more CCA increments are already planned to field more specialized drones for different types of combat operations, including air-to-ground (or attack) missions, intelligence, electronic warfare, and more.

Feature Image: A YFQ-42A Collaborative Combat Aircraft takes off during flight testing at a California test location. The aircraft was developed in partnership with General Atomics as part of the Air Force’s effort to accelerate delivery of affordable, semi-autonomous aircraft. (U.S. Air Force via General Atomics)

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