Anduril built the drone, fired the missile, opened a store. Congress still hasn't paid.

A missile-firing drone, parked behind a budget line

The first FQ-44 Fury built at Anduril's Arsenal-1 plant rolled out on 28 July, weeks after its prototype became the first Collaborative Combat Aircraft to fire a live AIM-120 AMRAAM↗ ¹². The production contract behind it, won in June↗ alongside a parallel award to General Atomics, cannot begin until Congress appropriates fiscal 2027 money ¹³. "Even a company like ours can only do so much without procurement dollars," Erin Simpson, Anduril's vice president for strategy execution, said on 15 September ¹.

The storefront skips the budget cycle. The fighter cannot.

Armory, the marketplace Anduril quietly rolled out, is live: a browsable catalog of Wisp sensors, Dive-LD undersea vehicles and Voyager chassis, with orders already booked↗ ⁶. It went online in mid-2026 as a click-to-buy channel aimed at the Pentagon's five-year procurement cycles↗ ⁷. A buyer can inquire about a sensor in an afternoon; the Fury cannot ship until an appropriation clears. Barracuda missiles were not listed as of Tuesday night ⁶.

About $1 billion is frozen until 11 December

The Air Force asked for roughly $1 billion to start buying CCAs in fiscal 2027, about $996.5 million in procurement plus $150 million in advance funding, inside a $2.37 billion program request, figures GovCon Wire reports citing Air & Space Forces Magazine ³. The stopgap Congress passed this month↗ holds Pentagon spending at 2026 levels through 11 December and blocks new program starts ¹⁴. Arsenal-1 is built for 150 Furies a year; Air Force Secretary Troy Meink expects roughly 500 CCAs in service by 2032 ¹⁴.

The investors carry the float

Until dollars move, Anduril pays: the factory, long-lead parts and weapons integration, from 500-pound bombs to the Barracuda 500, all sit on its own tab ¹. The float came from a $5 billion Series H at a $61 billion valuation in May↗, double the $30.5 billion of a year earlier, on more than $11 billion raised to date ⁵. The Air Force gets the option; the investors pay the carrying cost.

December decides

General Atomics is building at risk in the same increment, its FQ-42A in full-scale manufacturing after an April crash was traced to an autopilot software error and fixed ². Simpson's ask is an "anomaly," a funding exception inside any next stopgap: "we are ready to turn dollars into airplanes" ¹⁴. If December ends with neither a budget nor an exception, the next round, reported by Reuters at roughly $100 billion in talks↗, is likely to price on appropriations rather than demonstrations: rounds close against committed revenue, and the December vote is the input ⁸.