As geopolitical tensions rise, the US Department of Defense expands its integration of artificial intelligence to stay ahead and turn to AI agents to simulate confrontations with foreign opponents.
On Wednesday, the Defense Innovation Unit, an organization of the Ministry of Defense, awarded a prototype contract to scale AI in San Francisco to build Thunderforge, an AI platform designed to improve the decision-making of the battlefield.
‘[Thunderforge] Will be the flagship program within the DOD for AI-based military planning and operations, ”Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang said Wednesday on X.
Scale AI is launched in 2016 by Wang and Lucy Guo and helps to speed up the development by providing labeled data and the infrastructure needed to train AI models.
To develop Thunderforge, Scale AI will collaborate with Microsoft, Google and American Defense contractor Anduril Industries, Wang said.
Thunderforge will initially be used in the US Indo-Pacific Command, which is active in the Pacific, the Indian Ocean and parts of Asia, and the American European Command, which supervises Europe, the Middle East, the North Pole and the Atlantic Ocean.
Thunderforge will support the campaign strategy, the allocation of resources and strategic assessments, according to a rack On Wednesday.
“Thunderforge brings AI-driven analysis and automation to operational and strategic planning, allowing decision makers to operate at the pace needed for emerging conflicts,” said Diu Thunderforge program-Lead Bryce Goodman in the statement.
Ai-oriented or “Agent warfare”Represents a shift of traditional warfare, in which experts manually coordinate scenarios and make decisions for days, to an AI-driven model where decisions can be made in minutes.
Make sure that AI performs reliably in real-world defense applications is particularly challenging, especially when they are confronted with unpredictable scenarios and ethical considerations.
“These AIs are trained in collected historical data and simulated data, which may not cover all possible situations in the real world,” Professor Informatics told USC Sean Ren Decrypt. “Moreover, defense activities are usual users with high efforts, so we need the AI to understand human values and to make ethical decisions that are still active research.”
Challenges and guaranteeing
As the founder of the decentralized AI developer established in Los Angeles Sahara aiRen said that building realistic AI-driven wargaming simulations with considerable challenges in accuracy and adaptability.
“I think two important aspects make this possible: collecting a large amount of real-world data for reference when building wargaming simulations and to include various limitations of both physical and human aspects,” he said.
To create adaptive and strategic AI for wargaming simulations, Ren said that it is crucial to use training methods with which the system can learn from experience and to refine decision-making over time.
“Strengthening learning is a model training technique that can learn from the ‘outcome/feedback’ of a series of actions,” he said.
“In Wargaming simulations, the AI exploratory actions can take and look for positive or negative results from the simulated environment,” he added. “Depending on how extensive the simulated environment is, this is useful for the AI to explore different situations exhaustively.”
With the growing role of AI in the military strategy, the Pentagon is more deals with private AI companies such as scale AI to strengthen its capacities.
While the idea of AI used by soldiers can evoke images of ‘The Terminator’, military AI developers such as Kratos Defense in San Diego say that fear is unfounded.
“In the military context we usually see very advanced autonomy and elements of classic machine learning, where machines help with decision -making, but this usually does not mean decisions to release weapons,” is Kratos Defense President of Unmanned Systems Division, Steve Finley, told earlier Decrypt. “AI significantly speeds up data collection and analysis to form decisions and conclusions.”
One of the greatest concerns in discussing the integration of AI in military operations is to ensure that human supervision remains a fundamental part of decision -making, especially in scenarios with high commitment.
“If a weapon is involved or a maneuver risks human life, a human decision maker is always in the barrel,” said Finley. “There is always a security – a ‘stop’ or ‘hold’ – for every release of weapons or critical maneuver.”
Published by Sebastian Sinclair
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