#military-ai

#military-ai

The military is going to use artificial intelligence. But while planners in the government may have an idea of the best way forward, can they truly lead, or will industry steer things forward? In a new Breaking Defense video on the future of military AI, Breaking Defense Editor-in-Chief Aaron Mehta and our in-house AI expert Sydney Freedberg are joined by Joshua Wallin of the Center for a New American Security to tackle that very question.

Lilt, an AI translation company, contracts with the US military to analyze foreign intelligence. Because the company's software handles sensitive information, it must be installed on government servers and work without an internet connection, a practice known as air-gapping. Lilt previously developed its own AI models or used open source options such as Meta's Llama and Google's Gemma. But OpenAI's tools were off the table because they were closed source and could only be accessed online.

"I think the secularists in Silicon Valley are filling the God-shaped hole in their heart with AGI," Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar said in an interview with the New York Times's Ross Douthat. "It's like, OK, the models get better. Why do you think that this cliff is going to happen where they somehow turn us into house cats?"

From urban air taxis to hybrid combat drones, each concept seemed to inch closer to what once felt like science fiction. But every now and then, a creation comes along that feels straight out of Gotham. A machine so darkly sophisticated it blurs the line between military technology and cinematic imagination. Shield AI's X-BAT is that machine: a stealthy, autonomous VTOL jet that looks and behaves like Batman's next aircraft, only it's very much real.

It's not just the civilian corporate executives and white-collar workers who are leaning into the generative AI boom at work. Military leaders are diving in too. The top US Army commander in South Korea shared that he is experimenting with generative AI chatbots to sharpen his decision-making, not in the field, but in command and daily work. He said "Chat and I" have become "really close lately."

The platform ingests data from multiple sensors, such as air, land, sea, and space-based imagery and signals, to detect battlefield threats like drones, enemy positions, or other targets. FPS does all of that in a no-code, hardware-agnostic environment that lets the average soldier in the field "build, retrain, and deploy custom machine learning models at the edge without coding," according to the company. Most critically, FPS is designed to operate without a connection to the internet or cloud services.

"I can say that the demand for data is incredibly high, but at the moment, we are forming policy on how to organize this process correctly," said Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's digital minister, in an interview with Reuters published on Wednesday. But Fedorov's comments indicate Ukraine won't freely give out this data, which he called "priceless." Kyiv is "very carefully" considering how to share its records and footage with its allies, the minister said.