Trump praised AI drone killer at the White House

U.S. President Donald Trump just gave Allen Control Systems the most public endorsement a defense startup could ask for. Speaking at the White House, Trump praised the Austin-based company’s Bullfrog autonomous weapon station, calling it “that new very special machine gun that knocks them out of the air like flies.”

Allen Control Systems posted the moment on social media, responding directly to the President: “Thank you Mr. President, it is our honor to get the Allen Control Systems Bullfrog in the fight.”

The presidential shoutout lands at a moment when ACS is moving fast to keep pace with demand it has spent years building toward. In February, the company announced it was tripling its Austin operations to more than 57,000 square feet — expanding its capacity to scale low-rate initial production and research, development, testing, and evaluation capabilities for Bullfrog. That footprint expansion is not speculative growth planning. It follows validated contracts from the U.S. Army, U.S. Special Operations Command, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates, and comes on the heels of Bullfrog winning the U.S. Army’s xTechOverwatch competition, which brought with it a $2 million award to accelerate the system’s development.

Bullfrog is an AI-powered robotic weapon station that transforms standard service machine guns — M240s, M2s, M230s, M134s — into autonomous counter-drone platforms without replacing the underlying weapon. The system uses computer vision, artificial intelligence, and proprietary fire-control software to detect, track, identify, and engage Group 1 through Group 3 unmanned aerial systems, which covers drones weighing up to 1,320 pounds traveling at up to 250 knots. An operator authorizes the shot, but the targeting chain runs autonomously — the system finds the drone, locks onto it, and cues the weapon. The fully passive detection suite means Bullfrog doesn’t emit radar signals that could reveal a position on the battlefield. And at a reported cost-per-kill as low as $10 using standard ammunition, it attacks the economics of the drone threat rather than trying to out-spend it.

Bullfrog weighs approximately 400 pounds and fits onto existing platforms — ground vehicles, fixed sites, maritime vessels — without requiring major structural modification. The U.S. Army Applications Lab awarded ACS a contract worth $1.5 million, with options up to $4.5 million, to integrate Bullfrog across five of the Army’s most deployed combat vehicles. Abrams tanks and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles have already been part of that evaluation. SOCOM contracted ACS — executed through established defense contractor ManTech — to equip Bullfrog on maritime platforms supporting U.S. Special Operations Forces at sea, Defense One first reported. The system has also been demonstrated at the Pentagon and at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, where it went through technology trials that validated its real-world performance against the kind of small UAS threats that have reshaped how wars are fought.

The international dimension of Bullfrog’s footprint has grown alongside the domestic one. South Korea and the United Arab Emirates signed contracts with ACS in November 2025, with both deals including operator training, technical assistance, and sustainment support. The contract values and quantities were not disclosed, but the geographic spread — Gulf state, Indo-Pacific ally, U.S. Special Operations, and Army armor programs running simultaneously — reflects demand that cuts across every theater where drone threats have emerged as the dominant tactical problem.

ACS co-founder and president Steven Simoni has described the scale of that problem in stark terms. “Drones have completely changed warfare, and we’re still underestimating the threat as a country,” he told CBS Austin. “You’re seeing this play out in Ukraine, where I think about 80% of casualties are from drones.” That assessment, shared by an increasing number of military analysts and combat commanders, frames why a system like Bullfrog — cheap to operate, compatible with existing weapons, and capable of running autonomously — has attracted the attention it has. The alternative, defeating cheap drones with expensive interceptor missiles, is a math problem that no military budget can solve at scale.

Co-founder and CEO Mike Wior has been equally direct about what the Austin expansion represents. ACS’s investments in new production capabilities are designed to let the U.S. military and its allies “respond at the speed required to meet this problem,” he said. The tripling of the Austin facility adds high-skilled engineering and technical roles to a workforce already working across three locations — Austin, Alexandria, Virginia, and Huntsville, Alabama — building a production infrastructure that the company intends to grow further.

What started as an Austin startup trying to get a machine gun to shoot down drones accurately has turned into something considerably larger. Contracts on four continents. Vehicles at the tip of the Army’s armored spear running evaluation trials. A presidential mention from the Oval Office. The drone threat that ACS was built to answer has not slowed down — in Ukraine, the Middle East, and across the Indo-Pacific, small unmanned systems continue to find new ways to kill people and destroy equipment that cost a thousand times more to build. The race between the threat and the answer is still very much on. But Bullfrog just got a very loud vote of confidence from the most prominent address in America.