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Finland’s ICEYE has gone from selling radar images to selling whole satellite systems to governments. Sweden, Finland, Portugal, Germany and Ukraine are customers. European intelligence is increasingly being bought from start-ups, and “sovereign capability” has become a product line.
Flock Safety’s networked cameras log vehicles for thousands of US police agencies, often bought with federal grants. A bipartisan bill would force federally funded systems to be switched off within 180 days. It is the first serious attempt to roll back a domestic AI surveillance network by cutting off its money.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has handed Palantir an exclusive contract to run its case-management system and renewed support for “ImmigrationOS”. Reporting and litigation describe tools that draw leads from government databases, including Medicaid records. The procurement decisions are setting the reach of surveillance.
Police forces in England and Wales are being offered access to a larger fleet of live facial recognition vans, and there is money for a national system. The legal framework promised in May’s King’s Speech has yet to arrive. The order of events is the story.
Iran’s retaliation for the US-Israeli strikes sent more than 1,000 drones towards the Gulf in days. Each cost tens of thousands of dollars; many of the missiles fired at them cost millions. The war has turned an argument about cost-exchange ratios into a budget crisis.
Fifty thousand drones fitted with onboard computer vision are being delivered to Ukraine, funded from Berlin. A human chooses the target; software completes the approach if the radio link fails. This is where the debate about autonomous weapons stops being hypothetical.
America’s homeland missile shield is the largest new defence programme in a generation. Its interceptor contracts mix primes with start-ups, and its command layer is reportedly being written by software firms. The cost estimates differ by hundreds of billions.
Eight companies will put their AI on the Pentagon’s secret and top-secret networks. The department says 1.3 million people used its internal AI platform in five months. The lab left out is a reminder that usage terms are now a procurement issue.
A $20bn Anduril agreement and a $10bn Palantir one sound like the largest software deals in military history. They are ceilings, not cheques. Knowing the difference is the first skill in reading defence procurement.
The Pentagon has directed Palantir’s Maven Smart System to become a programme of record across the services. Meanwhile, the company’s second-quarter US government revenue rose 90%. The more interesting change is what that designation does to a piece of commercial software.