HavocAI, a venture backed American autonomy startup that raised $100 million for multi platform autonomy spanning surface ships, undersea vehicles, and drones, is running live multinational logistics at the 30th Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise in Hawaii, completing a four…
Four years after unmanned surface vessels first appeared at the world's largest recurring naval exercise as a demonstration, a venture-backed American autonomy startup is running live logistics missions alongside 30 allied navies at the same event. The shift is more than a public-relations moment — it is the most concrete operational marker yet, according to defense analysts tracking autonomous shipping, that the U.S. military's bet on commercial autonomous shipping has moved from experiment toward sustained operational use.
The 30th iteration of the Rim of the Pacific Exercise, known as RIMPAC, opened this week at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii. Vice Adm. Jeffrey Jablon, the U.S. Navy officer commanding the combined task force, told reporters that between 30 and 35 experiments at this year's exercise will feature unmanned systems, including surface ships, undersea vehicles, and aerial drones. He declined to name individual projects.
The scale around those experiments is unusually large for a testing exercise. According to U.S. Pacific Fleet, RIMPAC 2026 includes 30 nations, 31 surface ships, 5 submarines, roughly 200 aircraft, and about 30,000 personnel. Warships from allied fleets have already begun arriving in Hawaiian waters, and the exercise runs through early August.
The startup anchor for this year's autonomy push is HavocAI, a company that raised a $100 million Series A to build what it calls "all-domain collaborative autonomy." The company has confirmed it will deploy autonomous surface vessels at RIMPAC 2026 to move supplies between ships and shore for multiple participating nations.
That makes this year's exercise the most prominent commercial autonomous-surface deployment inside a multinational RIMPAC task force to date. The four-year arc matters. At RIMPAC 2022, unmanned surface vessels debuted as a U.S. Navy demonstration, drawing attention mostly as a future-looking stunt. By 2025, HavocAI had formalized a partnership with South Korean shipbuilder Hanwha to co-develop a 200-foot autonomous surface vessel. This summer, the same class of system is feeding actual logistics into a multinational fleet.
Jablon's preferred framing of the exercise was deliberately broad. He said RIMPAC "is not about any one particular country or a deterrent for any one particular country," and that the ongoing war with Iran "had no impact" on this year's participation list, according to Defense One. The official theme this year, "partners: integrated and prepared," is broad enough to fit either a general partnership posture or a more pointed one aimed at regional competitors.
The closing ritual will be a live-fire sinking exercise, or SINKEX, in which the Navy plans to scuttle two decommissioned ships using a combination of air and surface assets. Whether the unmanned-systems track survives the exercise intact as a permanent logistics lane, rather than a recurring demonstration, is the more telling marker to watch when U.S. Indo-Pacific Command publishes its post-RIMPAC experiment list later this summer.