“My request to all of you is: Please, become rich off selling to the United States Army.”
This was Army Secretary Dan Driscoll’s parting message at the end of his Exchange session at the AI+ Expo for National Competitiveness, earlier this month.
It was the first day of the annual fair hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project, a nonprofit organization committed to U.S. victory in the technological race against China. The expo took place alongside the fourth annual Exchange, a speaker series featuring more than 75 national security experts, which commemorates Ash Carter, the twenty-fifth secretary of defense. When attendees at the expo tired of hearing from Silicon Valley, they could instead listen to leaders from Donald Trump’s Defense Department mount the stage and declare that their wallets were open.
“Delivering” was the theme of this year’s Exchange—and revealed itself to be semi-coded language for the Trump administration’s aggressive embrace of acquisition reform for emerging defense technology.
In April, the president signed an executive order to modernize defense acquisitions, which included, among other things, a directive to prioritize commercially available products and services. It seems that Driscoll and George took that reform very literally, as they described buying pairs of Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses off the shelves and telling their engineers to play around with them. “See how easy it could be?” they seemed to say.
“We have been bad to partner with, we have been a bad customer. We are—we have created many of the bad habits in our industry partners that we don’t like today,” Driscoll said, grinning through his apology on behalf of the Army. He later emphasized that the Army would need to “earn the right” to do business with for-profit companies by creating “clear demand signals” and “pathways to profitability.”
Beside him on the stage was General Randy George, the Army’s chief of staff, who had his own parting message. George explained that he wanted help from companies to formulate a pitch on the government’s embrace of “agile funding” for autonomous technology.
“We can’t lock ourselves into buying the same thing, you know, forevermore,” he explained while speaking about testing out a new cheaper missile model later this summer, seeming to signal a shift toward more short-term contracts for private companies.
But to fully deliver the Trump administration’s vision for national security, everyone would need to be flexible, and the merchants of death at the AI+ Expo came prepared to compete.
In the expo hall, Palantir—which the Trump administration has recently put in charge of compiling a master database on Americans—had set up a massive metal-plated meeting room, designed to evoke the company’s “warp speed” shipbuilding. The U.S. Navy has been a particular sticking point for Trump, as the agency, which is consistently behind schedule and over budget, flies in the face of his gestures at efficacy. And as Navy Secretary John Phelan said during his appearance at the Exchange, Trump’s priorities for the Navy could be summed up as “shipbuilding, shipbuilding, shipbuilding.”
Palantir also displayed a demo of an AI model by Anthropic, which responds to queries about the locations of ships in the South China sea, eerily echoing what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said could be an “imminent” threat from China over Taiwan just the day before. But not every query got an answer. Wired reported that questions to Palantir’s staff about the company’s work with the Trump administration were brutally rebuffed, and several journalists were briefly kicked out of the event.
While no one at any of these booths seemed particularly interested in talking about Trump on the record, his impact was everywhere. Only a few feet away was Exiger, a company providing AI-powered supply chain solutions, which recently unveiled a new product designed to help clients navigate Trump’s ever-vacillating tariff policies.
The lead sponsor of the SCSP AI+ Expo this year was Rhombus Power, which gained notoriety in 2022 for predicting with 80 percent certainty when Russia’s incursion into Ukraine would begin. The company’s prediction, formulated by tracking military movements and soldiers’ spending habits, was accurate within a day of the invasion.
Rhombus’s two main products are Guardian, which uses a large language model to assist with resourcing and budget building at the Pentagon, and Ambient, which is sold as a “digital nervous system” that provides AI-powered predictions to aid in decision-making for defense and national security. Of the roughly 32,000 predictions Ambient made in 2023, about 25,000 were accurate, Rhombus Power’s CEO, Dr. Anshuman Roy, claimed in an April podcast interview with SCSP.
Roy explained that Rhombus Power works exclusively with the U.S. government and its allies and has branches in several other countries, including Japan, Taiwan, India, the Philippines, and South Korea.
“I think we have them surrounded, if you know what I’m saying,” Roy told SCSP. But Rhombus’s booth didn’t feature any mention of a hypothetical U.S. war with China. Instead, visitors were invited to don V.R. headsets that played slideshows with case studies about its predictive capabilities.
As accurately as Ambient may predict violent incursions and foreign military strikes, there are other externalities to consider. It seems that any predictive tool could just as easily be used to protect Trump’s financial interests, or make his allies rich. The president has already exhibited a taste for market manipulation with his economic policy—why not national security too?
Rhombus Power works exclusively with the U.S. government and its allies, and is currently nearing the end of a five-year contract with the DOD that has a ceiling of $200 million, set to expire in September. Rhombus Power’s senior vice president of product and operations, Dr. Sarah Cowan, told The New Republic that the company is currently in talks to extend its contract with Trump’s DOD for another five years.
Roy appeared for a moderated keynote address at the end of the first day, on the “Future of National Security: AI and the New Landscape of Conflict,” where Donald Trump’s former Defense Secretary Christopher Miller seemed to have his own idea of what Rhombus Power should do next.
“Quite simply, there’s nothing new under the sun in national security. Although, Anshu, I’m gonna use books to emphasize my point—” Miller leaned down to pull something out of a bag at his feet. “What we need from you is—we need Ender’s Game, baby!”
Surely not, right?
“I want to be able to have those kids that are out planning and preparing operations be able to run a thousand iterations in an afternoon, as they can bring in all the data they need,” Miller continued, holding up a copy of the 1985 novel by Orson Scott Card.
Of course, Ender’s Game isn’t about actual simulations, it’s about tricking adolescents into conducting remote-controlled mass murder. But at the AI+ Expo, remote-controlled mass murder is the product, and Trump’s DOD is buying.
The post The AI Industry Is Ready to Get Rich off Trump’s Defense Department appeared first on New Republic.
