Anduril confirms Iran captured UUV

The Anduril Dive-LD AUV captured by Iran's IRGC. (Islamic Revolution Guards Corps)

The founder of the US defence company Anduril played down Iran's capture of one of his company's Dive-LD autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) by describing it as a “mass-produced attritable submarine”.

“This particular vehicle has been swimming in CENTCOM [US Central Command's area of operations] for months, successfully operating in support of American forces for thousands of hours,” Palmer Luckey said in 9 September post on x.com. “It was explicitly designed to operate in environments too dangerous for humans where capture is an expected possibility. I can't get into the details, but it provided significant value for months before capture.”

On 8 September, Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) released a video and photographs of a Dive-LD it said its naval arm captured in the Strait of Hormuz earlier that day. The photographs showed it had ‘DI E-LD' written on its starboard side, the ‘v' in its name having been removed.

The IRGC did not link the AUV's capture to its announcement on 6 September that it had attacked a US unmanned submarine that attempted to enter the Strait of Hormuz.

After the IRGC's 8 September announcement, CENTCOM spokesman US Navy Captain Tim Hawkins told the media that the Dive-LD was an older model that malfunctioned more than a day before it was captured.

Originally developed by Dive Technologies, which was bought by Anduril in 2022, the Dive-LD entered service with the US Navy's Unmanned Undersea Vehicle Group 1 in April 2025. It is unclear how many Dive-LDs have been delivered since then but Anduril announced in June 2024 that it was establishing a new production facility that will increase production capacity from 12 to 200 a year.