The growing relationship between Silicon Valley and the defense industry opened a new chapter on Wednesday when Anduril announced a partnership with generative AI leader and ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
The arrangement—financial terms were not disclosed—suggests that OpenAI is looking beyond the consumer market to tailor tools for the U.S. government, or at least government contractors. It also shows a sea change in Silicon Valley, where just a few years ago search giant Google stepped away from a lucrative Pentagon contract at the behest of employees and users.
The deal may be connected to Anduril’s new $100 million Pentagon contract for “edge data integration,” Read that to mean large-scale software to quickly pull together and organize huge volumes of data coming from the battlefield and beyond—the object being much faster operations, particularly involving the deployment of and defense against unmanned weapons of the sort sought by the Defense Department’s Replicator program.
An Anduril spokesperson said OpenAI and its powerful (and popular) large language model promise to help turn that data into something that operators and analysts can actually use.
The addition of OpenAI tools to Anduril’s Lattice mesh network will help “assess drone threats more quickly and accurately, giving operators the information they need to make better decisions while staying out of harm’s way,” the spokesperson said.
The Defense Department has been experimenting with Lattice in the Pacific and Middle East regions.
“By bringing together OpenAI’s advanced models with Anduril’s high-performance defense systems and Lattice software platform, the partnership aims to improve the nation’s defense systems that protect U.S. and allied military personnel from attacks by unmanned drones and other aerial devices,” the company said in a Wednesday statement said
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was quoted in the statement: “Our partnership with Anduril will help ensure OpenAI technology protects U.S. military personnel, and will help the national security community understand and responsibly use this technology to keep our citizens safe and free.”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Pentagon’s interest in generative AI, both as a tool and as a challenge in the hands of adversaries, has received considerable attention under the office of the Deputy Defense Secretary, which launched a task force in August 2023 to explore its national-security implications.
Some researchers have warned that consumer-facing AI tools like large-language models, trained on large amounts of publicly available information, could pose privacy and accuracy risks in military contexts.
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