Right now, humans also have to translate between systems made by different manufacturers. One soldier might have to manually rotate a camera to look around a base and see if there’s a drone threat, and then manually send information about that drone to another soldier operating the weapon to take it down. Those instructions might be shared via a low-tech messenger app—one on par with AOL Instant Messenger. That takes time. It’s a problem the Pentagon is attempting to solve through its Joint All-Domain Command and Control plan, among other initiatives.
“For a long time, we’ve known that our military systems don’t interoperate,” says Chris Brose, former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee and principal advisor to Senator John McCain, who now works as Anduril’s chief strategy officer. Much of his work has been convincing Congress and the Pentagon that a software problem is just as worthy of a slice of the defense budget as jets and aircraft carriers. (Anduril spent nearly $1.6 million on lobbying last year, according to data from Open Secrets, and has numerous ties with the incoming Trump administration: Anduril founder Palmer Luckey has been a longtime donor and supporter of Trump, and JD Vance spearheaded an investment in Anduril in 2017 when he worked at venture capital firm Revolution.)
Defense hardware also suffers from a connectivity problem. Tom Keane, a senior vice president in Anduril’s connected warfare division, walked me through a simple example from the civilian world. If you receive a text message while your phone is off, you’ll see the message when you turn the phone back on. It’s preserved. “But this functionality, which we don’t even think about,” Keane says, “doesn’t really exist” in the design of many defense hardware systems. Data and communications can be easily lost in challenging military networks. Anduril says its system instead stores data locally.
An AI data treasure trove
The push to build more AI-connected hardware systems in the military could spark one of the largest data collection projects the Pentagon has ever undertaken, and companies like Anduril and Palantir have big plans.
“Exabytes of defense data, indispensable for AI training and inferencing, are currently evaporating,” Anduril said on December 6, when it announced it would be working with Palantir to compile data collected in Lattice, including highly sensitive classified information, to train AI models. Training on a broader collection of data collected by all these sensors will also hugely boost the model-building efforts that Anduril is now doing in a partnership with OpenAI, announced on December 4. Earlier this year, Palantir also offered its AI tools to help the Pentagon reimagine how it categorizes and manages classified data. When Anduril founder Palmer Luckey told me in an interview in October that “it’s not like there’s some wealth of information on classified topics and understanding of weapons systems” to train AI models on, he may have been foreshadowing what Anduril is now building.
Even if some of this data from the military is already being collected, AI will suddenly make it much more useful. “What is new is that the Defense Department now has the capability to use the data in new ways,” Emelia Probasco, a senior fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University, wrote in an email. “More data and ability to process it could support great accuracy and precision as well as faster information processing.”
The sum of these developments might be that AI models are brought more directly into military decision-making. That idea has brought scrutiny, as when Israel was found last year to have been using advanced AI models to process intelligence data and generate lists of targets. Human Rights Watch wrote in a report that the tools “rely on faulty data and inexact approximations.”
“I think we are already on a path to integrating AI, including generative AI, into the realm of decision-making,” says Probasco, who authored a recent analysis of one such case. She examined a system built within the military in 2023 called Maven Smart System, which allows users to “access sensor data from diverse sources [and] apply computer vision algorithms to help soldiers identify and choose military targets.”
