defense

The US Air Force is exploring agentic AI to help manage maintenance data for its aging Minuteman III nuclear missiles, whose replacement remains delayed. The AI would unify data from ~60 fragmented sources to speed up repair and replacement decisions.

The US Navy confirmed that a frontline destroyer used a ship-mounted laser weapon to defeat multiple uncrewed aerial threats during an at-sea demonstration.

Top US officials warn that AI risks necessitate stronger cyber defenses, urging enhanced security measures to counter emerging threats.

The article discusses gallium's critical role in defense technology, highlighting US supply-chain vulnerabilities that impair precision missile and F-35 production.

The US Army is poised to sign a landmark contract to acquire and deploy Enduring High Energy Laser weapons to defend bases against drone attacks, marking the first large-scale commitment to laser weapons in US military history.

The U.S. military has used nearly all of its long-range precision missiles (ATACMS and PrSM) during the five-month war with Iran, raising concerns about readiness for future conflicts.

China's air force has unveiled an AI-enabled 'intelligent strike planning system' that can plan and coordinate mass air strikes involving over 100 units, prioritizing targets and allocating tasks to units. Developed by Senior Colonel Deng Jianping, the system helps commanders keep up with hundreds of fast-moving targets and formations.

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.