We're faced with the biggest military buildup in history. We're trending toward artificial general intelligence, a substrate, a layer, something that will touch everything. But we're way behind in AI at the department.
You are CTO for the Department of War. How do you take stock of where those priorities are?
When I took the role, we had 14 critical priority areas. We got them down to six, and they were the places where I thought we had the greatest opportunity for change and for growth and impact.
There has been an incredibly public discussion about commercial AI models being used in the Pentagon. What has changed in this latest discussion?
I had a holy cow moment because there were things well beyond what you've been hearing in the press in the last couple weeks.
All right. Thank you for being with us. I know every week is very busy for you, but it feels like this past week has probably been the most publicly busy for you. So thanks for thanks for joining us.
My pleasure. Good to be here.
Look, we're going to talk about Anthropic, AI, and defense, but I think we want to talk first a little bit about you, how you got into this seat. This is not your first tour of duty in government. You have decided to be a public servant before and for a long time. For half this room that comes from the technology side, they know you as an incredibly accomplished Silicon Valley executive, highly sought after, very successful. Let's start with what pulled you into public service? How did it start, and why do it, and why take on this role now?
After my first company, Tellme Networks, we had this speech recognition software we sold to Microsoft in '07. I kind of needed a break from tech, so I applied to this White House Fellowship program, which was super cool. Colin Powell had done it, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Keane had done it. It was just a cool program, and it was a year nonpartisan program. I got selected, which was awesome, and I got assigned to Robert Gates, who was the Secretary of Defense at the time.
So I got to spend time in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and I got a passion for that world. It was so new to me, and I said someday I'll come back when I'm ready to really go. Then President Trump got elected, and I was like, "Wow, this is a moment where you have a disruptor at the top." He chose Secretary Hegseth, and that meant all the problems I'd seen, there would be a clearer way to solve them. You could see by the pace we're moving at—the executive orders, critical minerals, new tech, new entrants—the pace is incredible relative to what it was before. So I'm excited to be there.
Awesome. Well, why don't you talk to us a little bit about that? You have been outspoken that the Department of War cannot operate at peacetime speed. This is kind of like how we tell founders, you can be a wartime CEO or a peacetime CEO. What does peacetime speed mean? What is the problem with it? And what does winning look like? What does moving with urgency look like?
Well, peacetime speed started after the Cold War was over at the Department of War. I guess there was some famous event called the Last Supper where the leaders at the Pentagon said to industry, "Hey, there's not going to be a lot more buying of weapon systems or innovation. So y'all should consolidate and slow down your growth basically, and become dividend payers and stock buybackers." That lasted for a long time, and then the industry consolidated down to four or five primes.
So then we're faced with the biggest military buildup in history in China starting in the mid-2000s, like 2010, and we didn't catch up. So all of a sudden we've outsourced a lot of our key domestic production in many different areas, whether it's critical minerals, batteries, a lot of the supply chain stuff. Then you look up and you're like, holy cow, we've got a lot of catching up to do.
So wartime speed is ensuring that we're redomesticating the critical things we need for national strength, and we are moving out on that. We have exquisite capabilities. We have a lead in so many areas, but we have to make sure that we're self-reliant in key areas, and so we're running as hard as we can on that.
It was amazing to me. We work with a company called Skydio, and they were sanctioned by China. We usually hear stories about how companies are sanctioned by the United States from doing business here. But actually, if you're an important company and you get sanctioned by China, and you can no longer buy motors or batteries or other really key things that primarily come from China, it stinks. And if those products make it into the defense procurement cycle and we can't get them anymore, it's a huge, huge problem. So we've learned in our practice that it's not just the defense industrial base, but also all those precursors.
So talk to us a little bit about, as you stepped into the role—you are CTO for the Department of War—how do you prioritize? How do you take stock of where those priorities are? How do you figure out—if you read the news, it feels like there's an endless list of things that we need to catch up on.
When I took the role in May, I was sworn in, did the inventory like any new leader would do, and we had 14 critical priority areas in this role. My predecessors had 10, and then someone added four, so there were 14, and they hadn't changed in nearly a decade. So I get to look at them and say, "Okay, well, why are these critical?" And by the way, who can remember 14 things when you're trying to motivate a workforce? And what is an "integrated network systems of systems"? They were sort of technobabble.
So I said, "Let's study and say what's really important." We got them down to six, and they were the places where I thought we had the greatest opportunity for change, and for growth and impact on our combat power and for our industrial base. That was the starting point, and applied AI was number one.
Then we moved the Chief Digital and AI Office into my group, and we were able to run extremely fast with that because we're way behind in AI at the department, and we know it's penetrating the rest of the world so dramatically, so quickly. Our adversaries were also using it for lots of different purposes because they have less trust in their command and control, so they want to use computers to sort of eliminate human decision-making. We want to enhance human decision-making. So that's been a priority. In 90 days, I think we've had 1.2 million of the 3 million people at the department use some form of AI, when that number was 80,000 before I started.
Incredible. Let's talk a little bit more about why it's important to have advanced AI capabilities. Maybe some people would say, well, we've been really good at being a world power without all this AI capability. Why is it important? Can't we just focus on like making missiles and stuff?
Well, AI can help make missiles if it can help you solve physics problems, material science problems, aerodynamics problems, or opportunities. But we split up the AI efforts into three areas: enterprise corporate use cases, like any big organization would do for efficiency purposes—that's just normal goodness, everyone's happier when you could do mundane tasks faster; intelligence purposes, which is, we collect an enormous amount of intelligence, we have huge repositories of data at the department that's sitting there siloed, unused. Imagine decades of satellite imagery that you could use to train a model and get insights, and then use that to do anomaly detection so you could find out what's happening. So you take a human analyst and you increase their throughput by a thousand.
And then for warfighting. Warfighting, a big part of it is logistics: how do you plan logistics, find assets, do wargaming, plan operations, do simulations, and so on. So there's a lot of really important use cases that we could benefit from.
Yeah, we are the beneficiaries of startups that pitch us their ideas all the time. Because it's American Dynamism, we hear about companies that say, "Look, we're going to save 15% of the Pentagon's fuel budget through logistics by using AI. We're going to figure out how do you move the troops and the equipment and the vehicles in the most efficient way in a contested environment." These are all amazing, incredible use cases.
In the last week, there has been an incredibly public discussion about commercial AI models being used in the Pentagon, including Anthropic being used inside the department. In the old software days—and I'm going to really be in the old software days before even SaaS—people would just buy software and then the customer would use it however they want. What has changed in this latest discussion? What has come up? What are the issues? I assume most people in this room have been following along, so I think it's safe to assume there's a baseline understanding. But what have become the key issues and why did they come up now?
Well, they came up now because as I started to look at the contracts that had been written during the last administration for the use of AI, I had a holy cow moment because there were things well beyond what you've been hearing in the press in the last couple weeks. Things like you couldn't move a satellite, you couldn't plan an operation—couldn't plan it, not use AI to execute it—if it would potentially lead to a kinetic strike or something. Dozens of restrictions.
And yet these AI models were baked into some of the most sensitive and important places in the US military where we do exercise combat power: Central Command, whose area of responsibility is Iran; Indo-PACOM, whose area of responsibility is China; or SOUTHCOM, which is Venezuela and South America. They were all using this model, and there were no two vendors. It was a vendor-locked situation with terms that, in theory, if the model was designed to turn off when you violated the terms, could just stop in the middle of an operation and put lives at risk.
So that was the one moment I was like, "Okay, we have to fix this and clean this up while we're deploying this in the department." So that raised all these issues.
Then second, after the Maduro raid, one of the primary vendors for this, a senior exec had raised a question about whether their software was used during the Maduro raid, which is one of the most successful military operations of our lifetime, like truly an incredible operation.
It's been a bad few months for the enemies of America.
