Safe Pro Group has landed its first prime contract directly from the US government: a $2.5 million award from the Army to run its explosive-detection software on Anduril Industries' Ghost-X drone, protecting Abrams tanks and ground troops from landmines and ambush drones. The deal, announced November 10, was issued through a Commercial Solutions Opening for Ground Threat Detection through Aerial Reconnaissance, under the Army's Medium Range Reconnaissance program.
Safe Pro's software, branded Ground Truth Air, identifies more than 150 types of explosive threats, including landmines, anti-personnel mines, cluster munitions and ambush first-person-view drones, and streams that intelligence directly into Army networks including ATAK and Anduril's Lattice command system.
How does a drone learn to spot a landmine?
Ground Truth Air runs machine learning and computer vision models directly onboard the drone rather than sending video back to a control center for analysis, a design choice that matters on a battlefield where communication links can be jammed or cut. The onboard processing lets the system flag and geolocate a threat in real time, even if the drone briefly loses its connection.
That accuracy comes from training data gathered in an active conflict zone. Safe Pro says its models were trained on what it calls one of the world's largest real-world drone-imagery datasets: more than 3.2 million images with over 60,200 confirmed threat detections, collected across more than 40,520 acres in Ukraine. Training on live battlefield imagery, rather than simulated or staged footage, is the company's core pitch for why its detection rates hold up outside the lab.
Why does the Army want this now?
Ghost-X is Anduril's modular reconnaissance drone, built to swap in different sensing and software payloads depending on the mission. Pairing it with Safe Pro's detection layer turns a general-purpose surveillance platform into a specialized mine hunter, without Anduril having to build that capability in-house. For the Army, it's a way to clear routes for armored vehicles like the Abrams without sending soldiers forward on foot to probe for buried explosives, historically one of the most dangerous jobs in any ground conflict.
The contract is small in dollar terms compared to the billion-dollar drone and counter-drone deals reshaping the defense industry this year, but it marks a structural shift for Safe Pro Group: a prime contract, rather than a subcontract role, gives it direct contracting authority with the Army and a credential it can point to when bidding for larger threat-detection work. Landmines and improvised explosives remain among the leading causes of casualties in modern conflicts, and militaries from Washington to Kyiv have been racing to get AI-assisted detection into the field faster than demining crews can work by hand.
For Anduril, the deal is another example of its platform strategy: rather than building every capability itself, Ghost-X becomes more valuable to the Army each time a specialist vendor like Safe Pro plugs a new sensing capability into it. Expect more of these bolt-on software deals as the Pentagon pushes to field autonomous threat detection faster across its reconnaissance fleet.