Copperhead

Copperhead is a family of fast, torpedo-shaped autonomous underwater vehicles unveiled by Anduril Industries at the Sea-Air-Space exposition in April 2025. The concept turns the company’s undersea work inside out: rather than building a single large, expensive submarine substitute, Copperhead is a small effector meant to be carried in numbers and released close to where it is needed — by Anduril’s own larger autonomous undersea vehicles, by surface craft, or dropped from aircraft. The company describes a single Ghost Shark extra-large vehicle hauling dozens of the smaller Copperheads, then dispatching them to scout, sense or strike.

The line splits into two size classes, each offered as a recoverable utility vehicle and a one-way “M” munition. The Copperhead-100 is roughly nine feet long with a 12.75-inch diameter and a payload class around 100 pounds; the larger Copperhead-500 runs about thirteen and a half feet at a 21-inch diameter, in the 500-pound class. Both are electric and, by Anduril’s account, exceed 30 knots — fast for an underwater drone. The modular nose can carry a warhead, sonar, a magnetometer or chemical sensors, and Anduril frames the munition variants as cheaper, lighter analogues to the US Navy’s torpedoes: the 100M against lightweight-torpedo targets and the 500M against the heavyweight class. Range and depth figures have not been disclosed. Targeting runs through the company’s Lattice software, with engagements constrained to operator-approved safety volumes and a human in the decision chain.

Copperhead has no confirmed operator of its own yet; it was a vendor reveal, and the figures around “dozens per host vehicle” are capacity claims rather than inventory. Its prospects ride largely on the carriers Anduril is already selling — the Royal Australian Navy’s Ghost Shark and the Dive-XL line that the US Navy and the Defense Innovation Unit selected in 2026. Anduril released a short test clip of an inert Copperhead-500M in 2025, claiming an internal speed record, but no combat use has been reported.