Nine drone startups split a Pentagon order for 60,000 aircraft under a hard no-China-parts rule.

DefenseScoop reports Perennial Autonomy topped the deep-strike leaderboard and Neros topped close-quarters battle in Gauntlet II results. A month earlier most competitors failed the same specification, collapsing a $300M round. A provenance rule proving enforceable at 60,000-unit scale turns supply-chain origin into a bid-eligibility gate for every follow-on tranche toward the program's 200,000-drone target.