Ultra Maritime and Anduril successfully demonstrated the capability of Seabed Sentry and Sea Spear to detect and classify advanced unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) during the U.S. Navy’s 2026 Lanternfish exercise.
Ultra Maritime press release
In a major technological advancement for the protection of ports and critical infrastructure worldwide, Ultra Maritime successfully demonstrated a groundbreaking capability to detect and classify advanced unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) during the U.S. Navy’s 2026 Lanternfish exercise.
The demonstration showcased the company’s Sea Spear deployable sonar solution operating in a realistic port protection scenario, enabling the U.S. Navy and industry to evaluate emerging undersea technologies under operational conditions.
During the exercise, Sea Spear consistently detected, tracked and classified medium- and large-diameter UUVs. The demonstration validated the systems’ ability to provide persistent acoustic sensing while transmitting track data to undersea command centers worldwide. The exercise also marked a significant milestone in the strategic partnership between Ultra Maritime and Anduril to accelerate the deployment of this transformative capability for covert anti-submarine warfare (ASW) and broader maritime defense missions.
Integrated with Anduril’s Seabed Sentry, Sea Spear creates a distributed autonomous undersea network designed for scalable production and rapid deployment. The system can be clandestinely deployed from both manned and unmanned platforms, and provides persistent sensing in remote locations, maritime choke points and strategically important waterways. Depending on mission requirements, Sea Spear can be deployed as either a permanent installation or an attritable asset, offering a flexible, cost-effective approach to extending underwater awareness.
This demonstration builds on Ultra Maritime’s investment in autonomous undersea sensing and validates the company’s vision for scalable, distributed undersea surveillance. As undersea threats evolve and proliferate, Sea Spear provides U.S. and allied naval with a path to resilient networks of autonomous sensors across contested maritime environments.
– End –
Check out our video coverage of Anduril’s Seabed Sentry and Ultra’s Sea Spear during CNE 2026:
Anduril press release
A rogue autonomous undersea vessel (AUV) moves through a channel. A sonar system deployed on Anduril’s Seabed Sentry picks up its signature, hands the track to Seabed Sentry, and pushes the track into Lattice. Seconds later, an operator in the Navy’s Unmanned Operations Center (UOC) sees it on a screen, delivered through the Navy’s command-and-control (C2) system, and can take action to neutralize the threat. That sequence played out repeatedly during Lanternfish, a multinational demonstration event that brought together autonomous underwater vehicle and subsea technology from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Anduril’s maritime team played a significant role in Lanternfish, proving out a counter-AUV kill chain from detection to alert.
What Anduril Demonstrated
Anduril paired Seabed Sentry with Ultra Maritime’s Sea Spear, a lightweight deployable sonar system. Sea Spear consistently detected, tracked, and classified medium and large-diameter AUVs. Seabed Sentry ingested those tracks and published them to Lattice, Anduril’s battle management platform. Lattice then passed the resulting operating picture through the Navy’s cUxV system. The result: a live feed of every subsea and surface asset moving through the exercise area, visible to Navy operators in real time.
For this exercise, two outcomes mattered most: an operator-free alert system and end-to-end system integration with the Navy’s cUxV architecture. In operations, this meant that Seabed Sentry could detect an AUV and alert the Navy through its own C2 system without a human relaying the information by hand, all while Anduril’s software chain frictionlessly worked within the confines of the Navy’s relevant sensing and command technologies for this operating environment.
Built on a Legacy in Threat Detection & Mitigation, Pointed Beneath the Sea
Lattice has been the backbone of air defense and counter intrusion operations for years, fusing radar, electronic warfare sensors, and interceptors into a single command and control layer. Lanternfish proved the same software stack works below the surface. Seabed Sentry runs on the same proven Lattice core that tracks and intercepts UAVs — now optimized for the tasks of edge processing and fusion of acoustic data sources.
This application of Lattice only works if it can fuse sensors and systems that Anduril does not build on its own. At Lanternfish, Lattice ingested tracks from Ultra Maritime’s Sea Spear and pushed the resulting picture into the Navy’s own C2 system, with no custom software engineering required for either side. The same open architecture that enables Lattice to pull in a new radar for air defense and force protection now facilitates the integration of a new sonars for undersea defense. Mastering one domain built the foundation for Anduril to enter the next.
The Case for Harbor Defense
Ports, harbors, and coastal waterways face a set of threats that looks less like large submarines and more like a swarm of small, cheap, autonomous underwater systems. Adversaries are investing in exactly this capability set to threaten ports, pipelines, undersea cables and the broader category of maritime infrastructure that keeps the fight at sea connected and supplied. But a harbor defense system built only to watch for submarines or surface vehicles misses that threat entirely. Detecting a small AUV requires a different sensor mix, a different pace of processing, a different decision speed, and a different set of solutions that can respond to incoming threats at machine speed — not a series of undersea defenses built around humans.
Lanternfish demonstrated the pathway toward closing that gap: sensors that detect small autonomous underwater threats, paired with a command-and-control layer that already runs the same way across air, land, and sea. Seabed Sentry and Lattice give commanders a way to see that picture and act on it before a threat reaches the pier.
Anduril already builds highly effective, layered, and proliferated defenses that can protect against threats in the skies. Now, we’re applying the same concept for how we protect against weapons beneath the waves.
-End-
