6 ways Silicon Valley is getting close with the Pentagon
OpenAI's release of ChatGPT in November 2022 spurred a race to develop advanced generative artificial intelligence models — one that has seen some companies shell out tens of billions of dollars on AI infrastructure. But that's not the only place major spending is happening.
Since then, the U.S. government has paid companies $700 million for AI-enabled defense and security, according to an analysis by Fortune in November. Before ChatGPT came out, the Defense Department was already working on more than 685 AI projects, according to C4ISRNET.
Tech companies working with U.S. defense and intelligence agencies isn't new — some semiconductor companies worked with the U.S. government at the start, for example. However, some tech companies shifted away from working with the U.S. government as the focus shifted more to consumers.
Now, some AI companies are getting closer to the federal government — forming partnerships to provide defense and intelligence agencies with AI in the name of national security.
Here are just a few ways AI companies are working with the U.S. government.
In 2017, the Pentagon established an AI program called Project Maven for processing drone footage to find potential drone strike targets. Google (GOOGL) was tapped for its AI — a contract that received backlash from thousands of its employees.
'Building this technology to assist the U.S. Government in military surveillance — and potentially lethal outcomes — is not acceptable,' Google employees said in a letter to Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai.
Despite not renewing its Project Maven contract, Google has pursued other partnerships with the U.S. government. In February, the company updated its AI Principles to remove a pledge to 'not pursue' AI that could be used for applications such as 'weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people' and 'technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms.'
Data annotation startup Scale AI announced in March that it had won a Defense Department contract for a project called Thunderforge. The program aims to integrate AI into U.S. military planning and operations, and is the department's 'first foray into integrating AI agents in and across military workflows to provide advanced decision-making support systems for military leaders,' Scale said.
The startup added that Anduril and Microsoft (MSFT) will initially develop and deploy the AI agents — 'always under human oversight' — for the Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) and European Command (EUCOM). Anduril, which develops autonomous systems used by the military, will integrate the startup's large language models into its modeling and simulation infrastructure for planning, while Microsoft will provide multimodal models.
Data analytics platform Palantir (PLTR) announced that it was delivering 'AI-defined vehicles' to the U.S. Army in March. The AI-enabled TITAN vehicles are part of a $178 million contract the company signed with the U.S. Army in 2024.
The TITAN system, which stands for Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node, has deep-sensing capabilities and 'seeks to enhance the automation of target recognition and geolocation from multiple sensors to reduce the sensor-to-shooter (S2S) timelines through target nominations and fuse the common intelligence picture,' according to Palantir.
TITAN was developed with partners including Northrop Grumman (NOC) and Anduril.
AI startup Anthropic and Palantir announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AMZN) in November to provide the startup's Claude AI models to U.S. intelligence and defense agencies. Anthropic's 3 and 3.5 family of AI models will be accessible through Palantir's AI Platform, while AWS will provide security and other benefits.
'The partnership facilitates the responsible application of AI, enabling the use of Claude within Palantir's products to support government operations such as processing vast amounts of complex data rapidly, elevating data driven insights, identifying patterns and trends more effectively, streamlining document review and preparation, and helping U.S. officials to make more informed decisions in time-sensitive situations while preserving their decision-making authorities,' Palantir said in a statement.
OpenAI launched a version of its chatbot called ChatGPT Gov in January to give U.S. government agencies another way to access its frontier AI models.
Through ChatGPT Gov, U.S. agencies can save and share conversations within their workspaces, use the flagship GPT-4o model, and build custom GPTs for use in government workspaces. OpenAI said the infrastructure would 'expedite internal authorization of OpenAI's tools for the handling of non-public sensitive data.'
'We believe the U.S. government's adoption of artificial intelligence can boost efficiency and productivity and is crucial for maintaining and enhancing America's global leadership in this technology,' the startup said.
Palantir and Anduril announced a 'consortium' in December to combine technologies to provide the Defense Department with AI infrastructure, such as Anduril's Lattice software system and Palantir's AI Platform.
'This partnership is focused on solving two main problems that limit the adoption of AI for national security purposes,' the companies said in a statement — data readiness and processing large amounts of data.
Both companies have been awarded large contracts with the Defense Department, including Palantir's $480 million deal with the U.S. Army for a prototype of its Maven Smart System in May, and Anduril's involvement with the Replicator initiative of thousands of drones and anti-drone systems in places such as the Indo-Pacific.
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