Anduril wins XPRIZE Wildfire's autonomous response track; grand prize goes unclaimed

Independent reporting Curated by Anduril News from XPRIZE and 5 more · September 23, 2026 · 3 min read

What happened

XPRIZE announced the results of its $11 million XPRIZE Wildfire competition on September 23, 2026, at an awards ceremony at the New York City Fire Museum. Anduril Industries placed first in the Autonomous Wildfire Response track and received $1.2 million. Dryad Networks was second ($800,000) and AURA Foresight third ($500,000).

Anduril also won the separate $1 million Lockheed Martin Accurate Detection & Intelligence Bonus Prize, which XPRIZE said recognized its "rapid and precise multi-sensor detector performance." That brings Anduril's total to $2.2 million. Across both tracks of the competition, XPRIZE awarded $4.55 million, according to an announcement published by PG&E, one of the competition's sponsors.

The final test took place in June 2026 in the Alaskan wilderness, based at the airport in Nenana, Alaska. Each system had to find a high-risk fire anywhere within 1,000 square kilometers and completely suppress it within 10 minutes of ignition, with no human help and without disturbing nearby decoy fires.

Anduril's entry used its Lattice software to tie together fixed Sentry sensing towers, surveillance aircraft and Ghost-X drones. In Anduril's description of the system on XPRIZE's finals page, the towers and aircraft spot a fire, Lattice fuses and checks the detections, and the nearest Ghost-X is sent automatically to confirm the fire's location and attack it. Be Giant reported that on a retry run, Anduril's drone reached the fire and released its payload but did not fully extinguish it.

No team fully put out its fire, so the track's $3.5 million grand prize went unclaimed, Be Giant reported. An XPRIZE spokesperson told the outlet the suppression technology was "just not totally there yet."

Background

XPRIZE is a nonprofit that runs large public prize competitions. XPRIZE Wildfire, launched in 2023, had two tracks: one for detecting wildfires from space and one for autonomous response, which asks teams to find and put out a fire on the ground with no human in the loop. Anduril, Dryad Networks and AURA Foresight were the autonomous-response finalists tested in Alaska.

Lattice is Anduril's core software platform: it fuses feeds from cameras, radars, drones and other sensors into one shared picture and lets a few people task many machines. Sentry towers are Anduril's solar-powered surveillance towers, best known from U.S. Customs and Border Protection's border network. Ghost-X is the newer, more rugged version of Ghost, a small helicopter-style drone used mostly by militaries. Anduril has pitched Lattice for public safety since at least 2023, and in September 2025 it partnered with Korean Air on wildfire detection and response.

What to watch next

XPRIZE says the competition now moves into an Impact Phase, with PG&E as lead sponsor, to turn the most promising technologies from both tracks into tools fire agencies can deploy. Be Giant reported that the unawarded prize money goes to this phase, planned to last 12 to 15 months. Watch whether utilities or fire agencies adopt Anduril's system and whether later tests show full suppression.