Sweden’s Saab launches family of AI agents for future aircraft projects

BELFAST — Swedish manufacturer Saab has unveiled a suite of inhouse AI agents designed for future aircraft platforms, following testing of the new technologies on a Gripen E multirole fighter jet.

The move demonstrates the firm’s “ability to develop, train, and fly its own Al for air combat” operations, according to a company statement released today.

The company added that the agents use “various Al techniques to master tactical decision-making in complex operational environments.” They can also work with a pilot inside a cockpit or from its own uncrewed air vehicle.

Key to the autonomous project is Saab’s AI Fighter Jet Pilot Academy, designed to develop the agents and, in parallel, establish infrastructure necessary to “create, train and evaluate” them, noted the Saab statement.

“The harder question is how we turn this success [of flying with the agents] into a dependable capability that can learn, improve, and be relevant over time,” Peter Nilsson, head of Advanced Programs at Saab’s aeronautics unit, told Breaking Defense and other media ahead of the announcement. “[T]hat is the true purpose of the AI Fighter Pilot Academy.”  

He stressed that the “strategic advantage” of producing AI-driven data, “increasingly comes from reducing the distance between experience, learning, and field-led capability.”

It is of “enormous value to have a software-driven fighter like Gripen who can cope with this [computer processing] speed,” added Nilsson.

To date, the AI agents have predominately been tested and integrated with the fighter jet under Beyond Visual Range (BVR) combat conditions, much like a similar flight test campaign from 2025, when Helsing’s Centaur AI tool was used to take control of the fighter jet and autonomously complete a number of BVR maneuvers.

Longer term however, Saab plans on leveraging the inhouse AI technology to advance development of its future air programs. 

As Breaking Defense previously reported, the manufacturer is developing a trio of unmanned aircraft — the A1, A2 and A3 — on the path toward the design of a new loyal wingman drone.

The company’s latest foray into AI-based Gripen testing follows a handful of similar flight tests in 2025 when Helsing’s Centaur AI tool was used to take control of the fighter jet and autonomously complete a number of BVR maneuvers.

Meanwhile, in an effort to scale computer capacity for the AI agents, the firm has also decided to become partial founder in a Swedish government-backed initiative dubbed Sferical Al. 

Nilsson said that without Sferical AI, “otherwise you have to go to Google or Amazon … and pay some money” meaning, “you maybe don’t have full control of your data.”

To retain such a capability in Sweden is “enormous” for Saab, he added, noting that the new initiative was formally inaugurated during a ceremony in Stockholm last month.

Per a Saab slide shared by Nilsson, Sferical Al is built using Nvidia’s DGX SuperPOD architecture that makes it possible to develop Large Language Model and Vision-Language Model capabilities to aid agent and operator communications.

When Sferical Al is applied to a one-hour simulated training flight, it can produce the equivalent of one billion flight hours for a human pilot. “The exponential [computational] curve is … really hard to comprehend,” explained Nilsson.