Saab says an in-house AI agent autonomously controlled a Gripen E in beyond-visual-range combat scenarios

Saab says it has flown its own AI agents on a Gripen E fighter, according to a press release dated 3 November 2026. The company describes the agents as "in-house, flight proven" and says that during flight trials an agent "autonomously controlled the aircraft in BVR combat scenarios", meaning beyond-visual-range air combat.

What Saab says the agents do

• Saab says its Advanced Programs business unit "has developed a family of AI agents" that "utilize various AI techniques to master tactical decision-making in complex operational environments".
• According to the release, the agents "can support the pilot in the cockpit or operate alongside pilots in its own unmanned air platform".
• Saab says the agents, training environments and development tools "have all been developed within Saab", which it says gives it "full control over how the agents operate, how they are verified, and how they continue to evolve".

How Saab says they were trained

Saab says the agents are developed in what it calls its AI Fighter Pilot Academy, where they are "trained in simulated environments across multiple air combat capabilities". The release says that by accumulating millions of simulated flight hours the agents can explore tactics "far beyond what any individual pilot could experience in a lifetime".

Saab also names Sferical AI, which it describes as "a Swedish sovereign AI initiative providing secure, large-scale computing capacity for advanced AI development". Saab says it is a founding partner.

What "flight proven" covers

On the release's own wording, the flown capability is beyond-visual-range combat. Saab says BVR air combat "is one such capability, and it has now been validated under real flight conditions", and that during the flight trials the agent "autonomously controlled the aircraft in BVR combat scenarios". The release does not say that any other capability has been flown.

Peter Nilsson, head of Advanced Programs at Saab's Aeronautics business area, is quoted: "We have not only built our own AI agents, but we have also flown them."

Saab says it is "now continuing to expand the capabilities of its agents and to fly them in a broader range of scenarios".

What the release does not say

We read the English release, its PDF version and the Swedish version in full. None of them gives:

• dates, locations or the number of flights;
• whether a pilot was aboard, or how control passed between pilot and agent;
• any performance data, opponents or results from the BVR scenarios;
• a customer, air force or government programme. The only programmes named are Saab's own AI Fighter Pilot Academy and the Sferical AI computing initiative.

The release says Gripen E's architecture allows testing of new technologies "even in civilian airspace", but it presents that as a general feature of the aircraft, not as where these trials were flown.

We found no statement on the trials from Sweden's Försvarsmakten on its news listing page. The FMV procurement agency's news page refused our request (HTTP 403), so we could not check it.

Earlier work

On 11 June 2025, Saab announced with Helsing the first three flights of Helsing's Centaur AI agent on a Gripen E, the first on 28 May 2025, under Saab's Project Beyond. The new release does not mention Helsing, Centaur or Project Beyond, and describes the new agents as developed within Saab.

Why it matters

Saab says that "Future air combat is expected to rely on crewed and uncrewed systems operating together, and sovereign verified AI will be a critical capability in that environment". On our reading, the release establishes Saab's claim to have built and flown its own agents, but not how they performed: it contains no test data, so the results of the trials cannot be assessed from it.