Scale AI announced a multimillion-dollar deal with the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) on March 5, 2025, for the AI agent program Thunderforge to be used in U.S. military planning and operations. The agreement is spearheaded by the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), which is the Pentagon's innovation division, with the aim of developing AI-driven warfare. The program involves not only Scale AI but also technology partners such as defense technology company Anduril and Microsoft, who are working together on the development and deployment of AI agents.
The Thunderforge program employs AI agents in areas including modeling, simulations, decision support, proposed courses of action, and automated workflows. The DIU emphasised speed or its synonyms eight times in its release, highlighting that the program aims to facilitate machine speed decision-making in modern warfare. Bryce Goodman, Thunderforge Program Lead, described that there is currently a fundamental mismatch between the speed of modern warfare and their ability to respond. The program is part of a broader trend where AI companies are not only retracting bans on military use of their products but actively forming partnerships with the defense sector – as evidenced by Anthropic and Palantir's partnership announced in November 2023, and OpenAI and Anduril's partnership announced in December 2023.
The military use of AI raises serious ethical questions, particularly regarding potential harm. Margaret Mitchell, Ethics Scientist at Hugging Face, expressed in an interview with CNBC that even seemingly innocuous AI applications are one step away from direct harm and questioned how companies can ensure their technology isn't used for harm. The tech sector's military pivot is exemplified by Google's February 2024 removal of a pledge to abstain from using AI for potentially harmful applications such as weapons and surveillance, and OpenAI's quiet removal in January 2024 of the ban on military use of ChatGPT and other AI tools, as it began working with the U.S. Department of Defense on developing AI tools.
Sources:
Hayden Field
Victor Tangermann
OODA OG Analyst
