New Artificial Intelligence Takes Flight on Dassault Aviation’s Rafale

(Saint-Cloud, France, September 22, 2026) – Dassault Aviation has flight-tested two new sovereign AI algorithms on the Rafale fighter jet. The first was developed by the company’s engineers, while the second was developed in collaboration with Thales/cortAIx.

The development of these new functions is part of a broader initiative to integrate controlled and supervised AI into the cockpit, serving the human crew. They have reached a level of maturity that makes them eligible for future Rafale upgrades.

The in-flight testing of these functions once again demonstrates Dassault Aviation’s expertise in integrating AI into combat systems. This capability requires mastering several key challenges specific to military aviation: ensuring the availability and quality of operational data (real or simulated), leveraging and synergizing domain expertise, and optimizing resource efficiency on an embedded platform subject to stringent constraints.

These challenges are at the heart of Dassault Aviation’s experience as an industrial architect and integrator of complex systems for decades.