Anduril Taps AI to Overhaul Factories, Slashing Production Times

NEW YORK, NY – January 19, 2026 – Defense technology innovator Anduril is partnering with AI startup Dirac in a multi-year deal to fundamentally reshape its manufacturing operations, deploying an AI-driven platform that has already slashed work instruction authoring time by nearly 90%. The collaboration aims to solve a critical production bottleneck, enabling Anduril to build its advanced autonomous systems at the speed of software development.

In initial deployments, Anduril engineers saw the time required to create the detailed, step-by-step guides for factory technicians plummet from 12 business hours to just 90 minutes. This partnership makes Dirac's BuildOS platform a core component of Anduril's manufacturing infrastructure, a significant endorsement from a company known for its formidable in-house engineering talent.

The Bottleneck of Building at Hyperscale

Anduril, founded in 2017, has rapidly emerged as a key player in the defense sector by developing sophisticated autonomous systems, from counter-drone interceptors to unmanned submarines, all powered by its Lattice AI software platform. Unlike traditional defense contractors with long development cycles, Anduril's ethos is built on rapid iteration and constant hardware and software updates.

This relentless pace of innovation, however, created a significant chokepoint on the factory floor. As product designs became more modular and evolved quickly, the company's work instructions—the essential blueprints that translate engineering designs into physical products—struggled to keep pace. Before the partnership, over 100 manufacturing engineers at Anduril spent roughly half their time manually creating and updating these documents. This translated into thousands of engineering hours per week consumed by documentation and reconciling changes between CAD models and the factory floor, time that could have been spent improving throughput and quality.

The company faced a stark choice: either slow down its design innovation to accommodate manufacturing's pace or fundamentally reinvent its production coordination. For Anduril, whose competitive edge relies on speed, slowing down was not an option.

An AI Operating System for the Factory

After evaluating incumbent enterprise solutions and the possibility of building a tool internally, Anduril selected Dirac's BuildOS. The platform stood apart by treating manufacturing not as a series of static documents, but as a dynamic, living system.

Instead of creating flat documents from screenshots and text, BuildOS maintains a live, model-based digital twin of the product, the factory, and the relationship between them. It represents geometry, assembly logic, tools, and material flow in a single, unified system. The AI at the heart of BuildOS deterministically reasons over this structured data, interpreting complex CAD files to automatically infer assembly steps and generate clear, interactive work instructions.

When an engineer updates a design in a CAD model, the work instructions on the factory floor update automatically. This eliminates the painstaking manual process of re-authoring, prevents document drift, and ensures that production is always aligned with the latest engineering intent.

"Every serious manufacturer eventually hits the same wall: engineering moves fast, factories move carefully, and coordination becomes the true bottleneck," said Matt Grimm, Co-Founder and COO of Anduril. "Dirac is the only team that understood this problem from first principles and how to solve it implicitly." He noted that Dirac's BuildOS is becoming a core enabler of Arsenal OS, Anduril's own digital ecosystem of manufacturing technologies, making its factories more "adaptive, dynamic, reconfigurable, and context-aware."

A Strategic Bet on Industrial Speed

The decision to partner with an external startup is notable given Anduril's extensive internal resources, which include a tools team of approximately 280 people supporting over 35 product lines. The choice underscores a strategic "buy vs. build" calculation, prioritizing speed and specialized expertise.

"The Dirac team understands manufacturing at a system level," said Cy Sack, Head of Business Systems at Anduril. "Work instructions are the atomic unit of information in a factory, and Dirac's BuildOS is the first platform we've evaluated that actually models that reality correctly." Sack also praised Dirac's execution, noting the team "moves fast, integrates cleanly, takes feedback seriously, and delivers real value quickly."

The platform was deployed in an Anduril-hosted, ITAR-compliant cloud environment and delivered results within days, even before deeper integrations with Anduril’s existing Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) were complete. Beyond just work instructions, the system provides a continuous feedback loop, surfacing potential Design-for-Manufacturability (DFM) issues earlier in the process and offering insights into cost and tooling constraints before production even begins. Anduril expects to propagate engineering changes to production in minutes, not days, and scale its output without a corresponding increase in coordination overhead.

Bolstering the Modern Arsenal of Democracy

This partnership extends beyond corporate efficiency, tapping into a broader geopolitical imperative to "reindustrialize the West." Both Anduril and Dirac frame their collaboration as a key component in strengthening the domestic industrial base, particularly for national security. In an era of supply chain vulnerability and great power competition, the ability to rapidly design, produce, and scale critical defense technologies on home soil is a strategic priority for the United States and its allies.

AI-driven manufacturing platforms like BuildOS are seen as essential enablers for this mission. They make domestic production more competitive by drastically increasing efficiency and agility, allowing Western manufacturers to compete on factors other than low-cost labor. For Anduril, whose mission is to "hyperscale" the production of autonomous military systems, this manufacturing velocity is a direct contributor to national defense.

Fil Aronshtein, Co-Founder and CEO of Dirac, emphasized the strategic importance of this layer of the manufacturing stack. "Anduril is one of the most technically demanding manufacturers operating today," he said. "We're building the operating system that advanced manufacturers like Anduril actually run on. When teams operating under real constraints choose Dirac, it's because this layer matters. That's how the Arsenal of Democracy scales." As Anduril expands its use of Dirac's platform across more of its manufacturing programs, the partnership serves as a powerful proof point for a new model of manufacturing—one that is as dynamic and intelligent as the software that powers it.