The defense establishment’s AI awakening
SPACE NEWS
A new era of AI in national security appears to be taking shape — and the question is no longer if the defense sector will scale up its use of AI, but how quickly it can manage to.
OpenAI recently won a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense, a deal that’s significant for its size and scope, as it tasks OpenAI Public Sector with building prototype AI solutions tailored to national security needs.
In addition, the Pentagon earlier this year expanded its commitment to Project Maven, substantially raising the ceiling on Palantir’s contract with U.S. combatant commands from $480 million to nearly $1.3 billion through 2029. Maven has long been one of the Defense Department’s most visible AI programs, applying machine learning to satellite and drone imagery to detect threats in real time. After years of incremental progress, Maven is now entering a critical scaling phase.
On the space industry side, United Launch Alliance is piloting “RocketGPT,” a version of OpenAI’s chatbot technology hardened for defense use. The secure bot is running on Microsoft’s ITAR-compliant Azure Government Cloud, giving engineers a tool that boosts productivity without compromising sensitive data. About 150 employees are already testing it at ULA.