We're faced with the biggest military buildup in history.

We're trending toward artificial general intelligence, a substrate, a layer, something that'll touch everything.

But we're way behind an AI at the department.

You are a 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 there 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 of weeks.

When Emil Michael was confirmed as Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, he took inventory.

What he found was a department with 14 critical technology priorities, most unchanged for nearly a decade, written in a language

so vague, no one could act on them. He cut the list to six. Applied A.I. Went to the top. Within 90

days, 1.2 million of the department's 3 million personnel had used some form of AI.

When he started, that number was 80,000.

The more urgent problem was what he found inside existing contracts.

AI models baked into the most sensitive commands in the U.S. military, under terms that could

shut the software off mid-operation. A company's internal values document, he argues, cannot be

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