Anduril Industries said on June 12 it has expanded its long-running partnership with U.S. Customs and Border Protection with a $363 million one-year contract to deliver more than 200 additional Extended Range Sentry Towers (XRST) along the US southwest border. The award is the largest single Sentry Tower order Anduril has received and marks one of the most significant homeland-security deployments of autonomous AI surveillance to date.
Eighty-Foot Towers, Five-Mile Detection
XRST is the long-range member of Anduril's Sentry family. Each 80-foot expeditionary tower carries high-performance electro-optical and thermal sensors paired with radar, and uses Anduril's Lattice command-and-control software to autonomously detect, classify and track ground and aerial objects of interest at ranges that exceed five miles in unobstructed conditions. The systems can be flown into remote desert locations, set up by small teams in hours and run continuously on solar and generator power.
Built On A Seven-Year CBP Partnership
The new order builds on more than seven years of work between Anduril and CBP. The agency has already fielded hundreds of Anduril autonomous surveillance towers, including the 300th tower deployed earlier this year, and the company says it has delivered more than 40 XRSTs under the December 2025 baseline award and is building over 15 systems a month. Data collected by the towers is processed by Lattice, which uses computer vision and machine learning to flag potential incursions and route alerts to CBP agents in the field rather than swamping them with raw video.
Why It Matters
The CBP award is the second multi-hundred-million-dollar government deal Anduril has clinched in as many months, following last week's news that Washington cleared a possible $1.98 billion counter-drone Foreign Military Sale to Kuwait covering Anduril's Roadrunner-M, Anvil-Kinetic, Pulsar and Sentry Tower systems. It also lands in the same week the company unveiled a high-profile partnership with TKO Group's UFC and Zuffa Boxing, underscoring how aggressively Anduril is leaning into both defense procurement and public-facing brand building ahead of an expected public listing.
For CBP, the deal extends a years-long shift from staffed observation towers to AI-enabled autonomous surveillance and pushes the Lattice-powered XRST line deeper into routine border operations as a layered component of the Department of Homeland Security's wider sensing strategy.
Reporting based on coverage from Anduril, Defense Daily and Orange County Business Journal.