defense

US company Auterion is supplying AI-powered autonomy kits for Ukraine's cheap Shrike kamikaze drones, enabling them to autonomously track and strike targets without GPS or human guidance. A $100 million deal aims to deliver 50,000 such drones to Ukraine's front lines.

Chinese military researchers are reportedly using US AI models to train defense systems, raising geopolitical and security concerns.

Anduril's first YFQ-44A autonomous aircraft has rolled off the production line at its Arsenal-1 facility in Ohio, marking a milestone in the US Air Force's Collaborative Combat Aircraft program.

Introduces TopoGuard, a graph theory-based defense against split-knowledge attacks in RAG systems, where multiple individually benign documents combine to produce harmful outputs. The method detects malicious contexts by building a semantic similarity graph, significantly outperforming existing per-document filters like LlamaGuard.

This paper proposes Dialogue Critic Guided Sampling (DCGS), a framework that defends LLMs against multi-turn adversarial attacks by inferring user intent from conversation history and using value/regret-based critics to score responses, achieving improved robustness without fine-tuning.

The PAVE panel discussed the practical deployment of autonomous driving in off-highway scenarios (defense, industrial, logistics parks), emphasizing how it improves safety and operational efficiency rather than replacing humans.

Y Combinator announces a Request for Startups (RFS) focused on defending America, inviting entrepreneurs to apply with relevant ideas.

This paper identifies and attacks the alignment layer of graph foundation models, showing it is a distinct attack surface vulnerable to perturbations at low budgets, especially for spectral tokenizers, and proposes detection-based defenses.

The US Army has exhausted its annual AI token allocation from Ask Sage within a month after encouraging widespread use, forcing it to reinstate limits and raising questions about the sustainability of generative AI adoption in the Department of Defense.

Clement Delangue argues that open-source AI models are not a cybersecurity risk but a defense, as attackers can already jailbreak closed systems while defenders need transparency to secure AI.

Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar discusses how AI is reshaping defense, enterprise strategy, American manufacturing, and the future of work, including U.S.-China competition and AI's potential for reindustrialization.

Context bombs present a technique that exploits AI guard rails to defend against AI attacks, offering a proactive security measure for AI systems.

Impulse Space, a non-launch company developing the Helios kick stage, has been on-ramped to the US Space Force's Lane 1 launch program, aiming to provide rapid orbital transfer services using various rockets.

This paper introduces GhostWriter, a novel attack vector that exploits memory subsystems in LLM-powered personal agents to poison their memory store, achieving high injection and activation rates. The authors propose AM-Sentry, a defense that significantly reduces attack success while maintaining agent utility.

The US military is seeking cheaper hunter-killer drone alternatives after losing nearly 30 MQ-9A Reaper drones worth $1 billion to Iranian air defenses. The Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit has issued a notice for drones with comparable capabilities at lower cost, aiming for 20 mission-ready aircraft by 2031.

Forterra, a US autonomous vehicle builder, has deployed over 100 self-driving ATVs in Ukraine for logistics and casualty evacuation over nine months, marking the largest deployment of autonomous ground vehicles in combat by a US defense tech company.

A rocket motor exploded during a test at an Anduril facility in Mississippi, damaging the test stand but causing no injuries. The incident is another setback for the startup's efforts to become a major supplier of missile propulsion systems, as it has faced delays and technical issues in mass-producing rocket motors.

South Korea announces plans to train all 500,000 military personnel to operate drones as a 'universal combat tool,' inspired by drone warfare in Ukraine and the Middle East.

US Rep. Anna Paulina Luna denies staff used AI to draft bill text after a screenshot showed a Claude reference in an amendment summary, though she admits AI was used for spellcheck.

Foundry Lab Direct opens in Austin, Texas, offering advanced metal casting services for aerospace, defense, and hardware teams with faster production and stronger parts.