22 December 2024

Are AI defense firms about to eat the Pentagon?

PATRICK TUCKER

In an unprecedented wave of collaboration, leading AI firms are teaming up—sometimes with rivals—to serve a Pentagon and Congress determined to put AI to military use. Their growing alignment may herald an era in which software firms seize the influence now held by old-line defense contractors.

“There's an old saying that software eats the world,” Byron Callan, managing director at Capital Alpha Partners, told Investors Business Daily on Wednesday. “It's going to eat the military too."

Over the last week, Palantir, Anduril, Shield AI, OpenAI, Booz Allen, and Oracle announced various partnerships to develop products tailored to defense needs. Meanwhile, the House passed the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act with provisions that push the Defense Department to work more closely with tech firms on AI, and DOD announced yet another office intended to foster AI adoption.

Perhaps the most significant partnership is between Palantir and Anduril, two companies that offer somewhat competing capabilities related to battlefield data integration. Palantir holds the contract for the Maven program, the seminal Defense Department AI effort to derive intelligence from vast amounts of data provided by satellites, drones, and other sensors. Anduril offers a mesh-networking product called Lattice for rapid collection and analysis of battlefield data for drone swarming and other operations.

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