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.
“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.
“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.”
“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.
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.”
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.
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.
“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.
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.
“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!”
“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.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( The AI Industry Is Ready to Get Rich off Trump’s Defense Department )
Also on site :