The Pentagon announced that it is establishing the Artificial Intelligence Rapid Capabilities Cell (AI RCC) to accelerate the deployment of newer AI tools.
The announcement comes as its Task Force Lima, launched in August 2023 to analyze generative AI tools, is ending.
“Over the course of 12 months, Task Force Lima analyzed hundreds of AI workflows and tasks that AI tools could make more efficient or more effective. And we categorized all of those use cases into a smaller set of 15 areas aligned into two big categories: warfighting functions — like command and control [and] decision support — and enterprise management functions like financial management and healthcare information management. Upon completing its work, Task Force Lima submitted a detailed report,” Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) head Radha Plumb told reporters.
The next initiative will be a partnership between CDAO and the Defense Innovation Unit in Silicon Valley and will focus on testing technology.
“If warranted, we’ll use defined acquisition pathways to scale the technology across the DOD enterprise, and that can be within CDAO, with the military departments or with other key components,” Plumb said, adding that “rapid experimentation” will allow the Pentagon to “test and identify where these cutting-edge technologies can make our forces more lethal and our processes more effective.” She further noted that the AI RCC will “define the requirements for enterprise infrastructure” and “support scaled AI development that includes compute development environment and AI-ready data.”
The Pentagon will allocate $100 million for the AI projects. Part of the initiative involves a $35 million investment for four efforts that will begin “immediately,” Plumb said.
Two of the efforts will be “focused in war fighting use cases and two will be focused in enterprise management,” she explained.
In October, Defense technology firm Anduril Industries announced that it partnered with OpenAI to “explore how leading edge AI models can be leveraged to rapidly synthesize time-sensitive data, reduce the burden on human operators and improve situational awareness.”
The goal of the partnership is to “help protect U.S. and allied military personnel and ensure mission success.”
According to a report from The Intercept, the Special Operations Command may utilize AI to create fake internet users.
“Special Operations Forces (SOF) are interested in technologies that can generate convincing online personas for use on social media platforms, social networking sites, and other online content,” a description of the project says. The facial imagery packages must “Appear to be a unique individual that is recognizable as human but does not exist in the real world,” the document states.
