All posts tagged: military tech

The US Army Is Building Its Own Chatbot for Combat

The US Army Is Building Its Own Chatbot for Combat

Published by skeptic

The US Army is developing AI models trained on data from real missions, with the goal of deploying a chatbot specifically for soldiers. “We have all of these lessons learned from missions like the Ukraine-Russia War and Operation Epic Fury,” says Alex Miller, the Army’s chief technology officer, in an interview with WIRED. “There is a huge amount of knowledge available.” Miller showed WIRED a prototype of the system, called Victor, that combines a Reddit-like forum with a chatbot called VictorBot to help troops surface useful information, like the best way to configure electromagnetic warfare systems for a particular mission. When a soldier asks how to set up their hardware, VictorBot generates an answer and points to relevant posts and comments from other service members. “Electromagnetic warfare is such a hard topic,” Miller says. Victor, he adds, “can generate a response and cite all of the lessons learned from [different] units.” The Pentagon has ramped up its efforts to incorporate AI into military systems over the past two years, but Victor is a rare example …

Iran Threatens to Start Attacking Major US Tech Firms on April 1

Iran Threatens to Start Attacking Major US Tech Firms on April 1

Published by skeptic

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned Tuesday that it plans to begin attacking more than a dozen American companies across the Middle East on Wednesday in retaliation for the killing of Iranian citizens in the ongoing war with the US and Israel. The list of companies includes Apple, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Tesla, and Boeing, which the IRGC accused of enabling United States military targeting operations. The IRGC urged employees of the US firms to evacuate and civilians in the region to stay away. Tuesday’s warning, posted to the IRGC’s Telegram channel, extends a campaign of threats by Iran against American commercial infrastructure since the US and Israel launched their first attack on Tehran on February 28. Iranian drones struck two Amazon Web Services data centers and damaged another in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on March 1, in the first publicly confirmed attack on American-owned hyperscale cloud infrastructure. Banking sites, payment processors, and consumer services across the region crashed as redundancies meant to prevent outages were taken offline. Earlier this month, the IRGC-affiliated …

The US Military’s GPS Software Is an Billion Mess

The US Military’s GPS Software Is an $8 Billion Mess

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Last year, just before the Fourth of July holiday, the US Space Force officially took ownership of a new operating system for the GPS navigation network, raising hopes that one of the military’s most troubled space programs might finally bear fruit. The GPS Next-Generation Operational Control System, or OCX, is designed for command and control of the military’s constellation of more than 30 GPS satellites. It consists of software to handle new signals and jam-resistant capabilities of the latest generation of GPS satellites, GPS III, which started launching in 2018. The ground segment also includes two master control stations and upgrades to ground monitoring stations around the world, among other hardware elements. RTX Corporation, formerly known as Raytheon, won a Pentagon contract in 2010 to develop and deliver the control system. The program was supposed to be complete in 2016 at a cost of $3.7 billion. Today, the official cost for the ground system for the GPS III satellites stands at $7.6 billion. RTX is developing an OCX augmentation projected to cost more than $400 …

How Trump’s Plot to Grab Iran’s Nuclear Fuel Would Actually Work

How Trump’s Plot to Grab Iran’s Nuclear Fuel Would Actually Work

Published by skeptic

President Donald Trump and top defense officials are reportedly weighing whether to send ground troops to Iran in order to retrieve the country’s highly enriched uranium. However, the administration has shared little information about which troops would be deployed, how they would retrieve the nuclear material, or where the material would go next. “People are going to have to go and get it,” secretary of state Marco Rubio said at a congressional briefing earlier this month, referring to the possible operation. There are some indications that an operation is close on the horizon. On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Pentagon has imminent plans to deploy 3,000 brigade combat troops to the Middle East. (At the time of writing, the order has not been made.) The troops would come from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, which specializes in “joint forcible entry operations.” On Wednesday, Iran’s government rejected Trump’s 15-point plan to end the war, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the president “is prepared to unleash hell” in Iran if …

Meet the Gods of AI Warfare

Meet the Gods of AI Warfare

Published by skeptic

Nearly a year later, on a hot day in the high summer of 2025, I stepped into NGA’s headquarters at the Fort Belvoir Army Base in northern Virginia. It was my second visit to the spy agency HQ, and I wanted to find out why Whitworth had changed his mind, how much Maven had spread, and how Maven’s new backers saw the risks and rewards of mainstreaming AI into military workflows. By then, Whitworth had become so ardent a fan of AI that his agency was pumping out machine-produced intelligence reports for US decisionmakers that “no human hands” had touched. And the NGA had launched a $708 million contract for data labeling in support of Maven’s computer vision models, the largest such appeal in US history, that would ultimately go not to self-made billionaire Alexandr Wang’s Scale AI but to Enabled Intelligence, a startup focused on hiring people on the autism spectrum expert in pattern recognition and comfortable with repetitive work. My visit required the rigmarole of any meeting at a spy agency. Courteous background …

Justice Department Says Anthropic Can’t Be Trusted With Warfighting Systems

Justice Department Says Anthropic Can’t Be Trusted With Warfighting Systems

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The Trump administration argued in a court filing on Tuesday that it did not violate Anthropic’s First Amendment rights by designating the AI developer a supply-chain risk and predicted that the company’s lawsuit against the government will fail. “The First Amendment is not a license to unilaterally impose contract terms on the government, and Anthropic cites nothing to support such a radical conclusion,” US Department of Justice attorneys wrote. The response was filed in a federal court in San Francisco, one of two venues where Anthropic is challenging the Pentagon’s decision to sanction the company with a label that can bar companies from defense contracts over concerns about potential security vulnerabilities. Anthropic argues the Trump administration overstepped its authority in applying the label and preventing the company’s technologies from being used inside the department. If the designation holds, Anthropic could lose up to billions of dollars in expected revenue this year. Anthropic wants to resume business as usual until the litigation is resolved. Rita Lin, the judge overseeing the San Francisco case, has scheduled a …

Palantir Demos Show How the Military Could Use AI Chatbots to Generate War Plans

Palantir Demos Show How the Military Could Use AI Chatbots to Generate War Plans

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When the user asks “What enemy military unit is in the region?” the AIP Assistant guesses that it’s “likely an armor attack battalion based on the pattern of the equipment.” This prompts the analyst to request a MQ-9 Reaper drone to survey the scene. They then ask the AIP Assistant to “generate 3 courses of action to target this enemy equipment,” and within moments, the assistant suggests attacking the unit with either an “air asset,” a “long range artillery,” or a “tactical team.” The user tells the assistant to send these options to a fictional commander, who ultimately chooses the tactical team. The final steps play out quickly: The analyst asks the AIP Assistant to “analyze the battlefield,” then “generate a route” for troops to reach the enemy, and finally “assign jammers” to sabotage their communications equipment. Within seconds, the analyst gives the battle plan a final review and orders the troops to mobilize. In this scenario, Claude would be the “voice” of the AIP Assistant, and the “reasoning” it uses to generate responses. Other …

Trump Administration Won’t Rule Out Further Action Against Anthropic

Trump Administration Won’t Rule Out Further Action Against Anthropic

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At Anthropic’s first court hearing challenging sanctions imposed by the Trump administration, the AI tech startup asked the government to commit that it wouldn’t levy additional penalties on the company. That didn’t happen. “I am not prepared to offer any commitments on that issue,” James Harlow, a Justice Department attorney, told US district judge Rita Lin over video conference on Tuesday. In fact, the government is gearing up to take another step designed to sideline the company from doing business with federal agencies. President Trump is currently finalizing an executive order that would formally ban usage of Anthropic tools across the government, according to a person at the White House familiar with the matter but not authorized to discuss it. Axios first reported on the plan. Tuesday’s hearing stemmed from one of the two federal lawsuits Anthropic filed against the Trump administration on Monday, alleging that the government unconstitutionally designated it a supply-chain risk and turned it into a tech industry pariah. Billions of dollars in revenue for Anthropic is now at risk, with current …

GPS Attacks Near Iran Are Wreaking Havoc on Delivery and Mapping Apps

GPS Attacks Near Iran Are Wreaking Havoc on Delivery and Mapping Apps

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People on social media have reported strange events on delivery and navigation apps—drivers appear to be in the middle of the sea, or a 10-minute trip home suddenly jumps up to 30 minutes. For residents of countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council, or GCC, where life has more or less resumed despite Iran’s ongoing attacks, this is a subtle reminder that there is still a war being waged overhead. These problems are widely linked to electronic warfare. In today’s conflicts, disrupting satellite navigation is a common tactic. By interfering with GPS, militaries make it harder for opponents to guide drones, missiles, or surveillance tools accurately. But the same satellite signals used by the military also power civilian aircraft, shipping, infrastructure, and everyday navigation apps. When those signals are disrupted, the effects ripple out to airlines, shipping routes, logistics, and digital services that all depend on accurate location and timing. These disruptions generally happen through two related but distinct techniques: GPS jamming and GPS spoofing. Understanding the difference explains why navigation sometimes stops working and, at …

‘Pew Pew’: The Chinese Companies Marketing Anti-Drone Weapons on TikTok

‘Pew Pew’: The Chinese Companies Marketing Anti-Drone Weapons on TikTok

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“Pew, pew, pew!” a woman wearing sneakers and high-waisted pink trousers says cheerfully in a video uploaded to TikTok. She is standing on what appears to be an industrial rooftop while demonstrating how to use a black device resembling an oversized laser tag gun. “Jamming gun, good,” she adds, flashing a thumbs up. “Contact me!” These days, nearly any product imaginable is available for purchase on TikTok straight from Chinese factories, ranging from industrial chemicals to mystical crystals and custom pilates reformers. The app’s offerings, it appears, now also extend to drone jammers and other drone-related hardware with clear military and security applications. In recent months, TikTok has become an improbable showroom for a drone economy that powers conflicts like Russia’s war in Ukraine. Eager to reach customers however they can, small Chinese drone manufacturers are publicly broadcasting tools of modern warfare, including anti-drone rifles, jammers, and sensors, but presenting them with the breezy cadence of consumer lifestyle advertising. The result is a surreal combination of ecommerce and battlefield combat. WIRED reviewed dozens of videos …