Now, Pentagon officials say that some of that AI is not part of the current revamp of the polygraph interview process, after Defense News asked for a response to concerns about the earlier statements and the slides.

On Wednesday, the Pentagon’s Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, or DCSA, which vets security clearance holders and applicants, said in an emailed statement that “active research and development” for the “Modernizing Polygraph” effort “does not incorporate generative super intelligence, also known as artificial intelligence,” that creates new content — such as emails, graphics or voiceovers.

Nor does the effort include “large language models,” meaning chatbots like ChatGPT and other programs trained on giant data sets to engage in human conversation, DCSA added.

And the research does not involve “facial action coding [of emotions], micro-expression analysis or vocal analyses,” the statement said. “While those technologies are not part of the effort,” DoD will “continue to monitor emerging scientific capabilities to evaluate their potential utility down the road.”

DCSA did not address other types of AI models that, according to the slides, researchers had been developing to scan spoken and written language for “deceptive speech” patterns.

Wednesday’s statement came after Defense News sought a response to criticisms from national security lawyers, scientists and AI auditors about AI’s ability to analyze deception — meaning not just to lie, but to do so knowingly and willfully.

They warned that AI-aided scanning of speech patterns, vocal stress or facial expressions to read minds lacks scientific backing, will compound errors and may violate civil liberties in a domain where few such rights exist.

Defense News chronicled their concerns and the Pentagon’s prior research and development of AI-aided lie-detection and emotion-estimation tools.

The recent DCSA statement, including the project name “Modernizing Polygraph,” contrasts with several earlier DoD statements, 2027 budget documents and DCSA slides that Defense News obtained through an open records request.

In July, a Pentagon official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the technology, explained the advantages of AI-driven sentiment and deception analysis.

“AI processes data in real time and enables standardized, objective data analysis,” the official told Defense News, via email. “AI-based analysis is a force multiplier for our human investigators, not a replacement.”

The official added, “The models are primarily trained on data from laboratory-controlled studies using volunteer participants.”

The DCSA slides, which include presentations from 2021 through 2025, show that the Air Force, DCSA and academic labs had been working on “sentiment analysis” AI models and “deceptive speech” AI-aided analysis since 2019, as part of a “Credibility Assessment Modernization” project.

In July, the DoD official described the AI models as part of a larger multi-year “transformation,” which the official referred to interchangeably as “Polygraph+” and Credibility Assessment Modernization.

Current budget materials price the Polygraph+/Polygraph Next project at $31 million, including costs for AI “scoring algorithms” and “decision aids,” thermal imaging tools to spot blood flow changes that can reflect stress and other non-contact sensors.

On Friday, DCSA declined to provide additional information, including the scope of the “Modernizing Polygraph” project and the decision not to include AI-based voice screening and facial expression analysis.

Trained on Twitter and Reddit

Over the summer, Farakh Zaman, a developmental leader at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, elaborated on the appeal of AI-aided deception analysis.

“By processing subtle physiological, vocal and linguistic cues, these developmental algorithms may help establish a more objective baseline for investigators and pinpoint specific areas requiring further human-led clarification,” he said by email in July.

Wednesday’s DCSA statement said that the Air Force is not involved in the “active” research and development phase.

One undated declassified DCSA slide describes the Air Force amassing “deception-related” text to create a “deep learning model,” an algorithm that analyzes hordes of data to find patterns. The Air Force trained an early model on text from websites including Twitter, Reddit and other vocabulary data sets such as WordNet, according to the slide.

“This baseline training helps the algorithms understand natural, modern linguistic patterns, slang and everyday vocabulary,” Zaman explained in July. He acknowledged the need for “further rigorous testing, validation and a clear transition path” before fielding a prototype.

A separate DCSA slide, dated May 2025, contains a flowchart that depicts an avatar — a computer-generated image of an interviewer — in front of a security clearance applicant. Next to the applicant, a camera and microphone feed audio, video and speech-to-text data from the interview into various large language models. The recording devices and algorithms interact to gauge the applicant’s emotional state, while a human investigator observes and keys in questions for the avatar to ask.

DCSA’s Wednesday statement said the university that drafted the chart is not involved in the current research and development stage.

According to another undated DCSA slide, DoD has set a goal for natural language processing technology to interpret an interviewee’s feelings with 75% accuracy.

In July, the Pentagon official said by email that a human investigator remains essential for “the contextual reasoning and emotional intelligence required in these sensitive interviews.”

‘I’ve caught AI lying to me’

Ahead of Wednesday’s statement, Mark Zaid, a national security attorney who reviewed the slides, warned that the danger of derailing a military officer’s career is too great for AI to misinform an investigator.

The polygraph device “is just registering the physiology of the person,” such as spikes in breathing rate, perspiration or blood pressure, he said. “Then a human examiner analyzes those reactions to render an opinion.”

Here, however, “AI would be taking the polygraph readings and rendering an opinion” to the human examiner, said Zaid, who has represented individuals on all sides of the polygraph table, from workers disputing revoked clearances to former government officials and polygraphers.

“Now, we’re starting to get into the movie Minority Report,” he said, referencing a 2002 Steven Spielberg film that depicts a government reliant on psychic children for tips to predict crimes and detain people accused of future crimes.

Zaid, whose own clearance was revoked temporarily after he represented a whistleblower pivotal in President Trump’s first impeachment, said, “That concerns me more than the polygraph,” if science does not back AI’s reliability.

So far, scientific studies do not.

Rather, decades of research have discredited theories, popularized by shows such as Lie to Me, that anyone — human or artificial — can recognize deception based on speech patterns, vocal stress or facial movements.

Another concern scientists and auditors have is bias: the Justice Department has warned that using emotion-recognition algorithms to measure worker competency can discriminate against high performers with intellectual or developmental disabilities, who algorithms do not always understand.

Also, “automation bias,” the tendency to take AI’s advice without question even when conflicting information exists, may further erode the polygraph system’s reliability, technologists warned.

“[T]here is simply no consensus that polygraph evidence is reliable,” the Supreme Court declared in a 1998 decision banning polygraph results and polygraphers’ opinions from military courts.

Zaid said he appreciates the attempt to retool polygraph testing but wants proof that the planned approach is in fact an improvement.

“Anytime we might be able to scientifically advance the ability to determine truth, with accuracy, would generally be a good thing,” he said. But “the first thing that jumps out at me with AI is how often it is wrong…I’ve caught AI lying to me.”

Greg Rinckey, a former Army Judge Advocate General Corps officer who now provides security clearance representation, said that today’s “technology is so outdated, where they’re using tubes around people’s chests and blood pressure and sweat, so, any way that you can get a more reliable test for security clearances, especially counterintelligence investigations [into leaks], is a step up.”

That said, he questioned, “What is the research saying on how accurate it is?”

At present, research suggests the odds of AI-aided speech, voice or face analysis pegging a lie are about 50:50.

AI is ‘assuming dishonesty’

“There are no – reliable – diagnostic cues for deception detection, and I have yet to see any evidence, whether it is with humans or with artificial intelligence, that goes against that trend,” said David Markowitz, a Michigan State University professor who studies AI’s ability to understand human communication.

For instance, “the leakage idea — that these microfacial expressions will leak out from our awareness, signaling veracity or deceit — there’s very little evidence to support that, unfortunately,” he said.

Markowitz expressed doubts about AI-based deception analyses that claim an accuracy rate of 75% because “that is not how accurately humans do it, and often these systems are a big reflection of how humans do it.”

For example, he pointed to a recent experiment in which he prompted a Google Gemini AI model to examine audio and video of mock interrogations of accused cheaters in a trivia game, all of whom claimed innocence and some of whom were lying. Prior studies had asked humans to observe the same interrogations. DoD has entered into agreements to run a secure version of Gemini on unclassified and classified networks.

Markowitz said that his study, “The [in]efficacy of AI personas in deception detection experiments,” found Gemini was just as inaccurate as humans, both faring no better than chance, when prompted to distinguish fraudsters from truth-tellers.

What’s more, compared to humans, AI was more likely to wrongly accuse a trivia player of lying.

Markowitz gave one possible reason for AI’s systemic distrust of trivia players: The AI “is assuming that someone must have done something wrong because why else would they be questioned,” he said. “Anytime that someone is in an interview setting where they might be accused of something, a large language model is assuming dishonesty.”

Supreme Court: The jury is the lie detector

The consequences of a machine, whether a heart monitor or a voice screener, potentially bungling a credibility assessment can last a year or longer, said Zaid, the national security lawyer.

When officers who have successfully passed exams without issue suddenly fail their latest polygraph test, DoD typically puts them “in a corner with a dunce cap on for a year before officials will re-administer another exam,” he said. “You can’t get promoted. You can’t get certain assignments. And you can’t go overseas, which, to case officers, is death careerwise.”

Further, civil courts routinely dismiss complaints when employees claim that inaccurate results cost them their clearances. Nearly 40 years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that the courts have no power over such national security matters.

Concerns about power imbalances and due process prompted the European Union to label AI-aided polygraph tools as “high risk” and place strict limits on law enforcement’s use of them.

Stateside, the Supreme Court, in forbidding polygraph evidence in military courts, noted that allowing it would meddle with the human’s role, or, as it were, the jury’s role, in determining credibility.

“A fundamental premise of our criminal trial system is that the jury is the lie detector,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the Court’s 1998 United States v. Scheffer decision.

Pointing to the court’s decision, Zaid said that he wants assurances of due process when staff undergo administrative proceedings to contest a revoked clearance resulting from misaligned algorithms. Comparing the situation to successful cases disputing speeding tickets caused by a miscalibrated street camera, Zaid questioned, “Would the person be provided the evidence? An understanding of the AI’s training?”

New biases

Pentagon officials have long stressed the desire for AI-based lie detection to help curb gender and cultural biases that human investigators may carry into an interview room.

At the same time, employers’ use of similar technology for pre-employment screening has faced allegations of other biases and system errors.

“Facial expression analysis is heaviest in terms of biases against individuals with disabilities,” said Jo Ann Oravec, a University of Wisconsin professor whose research focuses on AI, public policy and disability issues.

For instance, AI-powered video screening of job applicants tends to misinterpret the involuntary twitches or vocal outbursts of skilled people with certain disabilities — and thus pass over qualified applicants, said Oravec, author of the 2024 article “From Polygraphs to Truth Machines: Artificial Intelligence in Lie Detection.”

In response to concerns about such biases in July, the Pentagon official said via email that the credibility assessment modernization plan adheres to DoD’s AI Ethical Principles of “responsible, equitable and traceable” use of algorithms.

The Air Force’s Zaman, in his July email, said that his team’s work aligns with DoD’s Responsible Artificial Intelligence Guidelines.

Researchers “are actively engineering and testing these models” to account for “diverse, representative training data,” he stated. The testing covers “broad variations in speech, language and expression.”

Ryan Carrier, founder of ForHumanity, a global nonprofit that helps organizations audit AI systems, said that the Pentagon’s principles and guidelines are a skeleton of those that the European Union follows and that ForHumanity uses for inspections.

For example, the EU’s AI Act demands users of high-risk systems receive training to overcome a different kind of bias called “automation bias” — or the tendency to execute AI’s advice without questioning its accuracy. This bad habit can lead to incorrect data overriding correct decisions, Carrier said.

Also, multimodal systems, meaning AI systems that simultaneously parse audio (the subject’s voice), video (their facial movements) and text (interview transcriptions), tend to misalign data and results, yielding an irrelevant analysis, Carrier said.

The system “could be making determinations that a person is lying or trying to deceive me that are outside of the tool’s specifications,” he explained.

In response to concerns about multimodal systems in July, the Pentagon official had said, “Any automated output is treated strictly as auxiliary data for a highly trained, certified polygraph examiner.”

Similarly, Zaman, at the time, said that investigators who use AI-aided deception-detection systems are “trained to contextualize the tool’s findings, preventing automated outputs from dictating an outcome.”

To safeguard against mismatched data or results, the Air Force keeps a documented history of each piece of data’s origin and modifications and brings in independent white-hat hackers to try producing false correlations, he added.

“We recognize that multimodal AI systems present unique technical challenges, and mitigating these risks by hardening our systems is central to our engineering and testing protocols,” Zaman said.

Reason for suspicion?

In August, when the Pentagon administered a raft of polygraph exams to probe leaks alleging the Iran conflict is depleting U.S. arsenals, some observers suspected the endgame was not to find the leakers, but to crack down on disloyalty.

Critics of the planned system said that AI-based deception analysis may be best suited to achieve the same purpose.

“If it’s purely an intimidation technique, it may not be utterly useless from the point of view of large bureaucracies,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.

The expectations for AI-powered trustworthiness testing resemble the hope that U.S. national security officials held out for the polygraph about 100 years ago, other lawyers said.

Polygraph devices “were seen as this magic-miracle-machine when they first came out,” and, over time, the government learned that when seemingly making deductions, the tools were “actually just flagging correlating factors, like heart rate and physiological factors that can indicate lying, but aren’t actually reflective of it,” said Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Security and Surveillance Project.

He added, “Thinking that AI sentiment analysis tools are actually making an assessment or engaged in reasoning — that’s not what those machines are actually able to do.”

Speaking Oct. 1 at the Bergen military training area during the army’s “Experimentalserie Land” trials, Pistorius said ground forces will begin forming the regiment in 2027. Officials credited direct operational exchanges with Ukrainian frontline units for shaping the live-fire trials, which tested both aerial drones and unmanned ground systems. Pistorius emphasized that ground robotics will serve as an equal operational pillar alongside aerial systems, with the regiment consolidating reconnaissance, deep-strike capabilities, unmanned ground vehicles, electronic warfare, and counter-drone defenses under a unified command.

The regiment will serve as a divisional asset assigned to the 10th Panzer Division − the formation earmarked as Germany’s high-readiness “Division 2025” pledge to NATO, which also oversees Panzerbrigade 45 in Lithuania.

German Army Chief Lt. Gen. Christian Freuding said the Bundeswehr is pursuing a dual-track strategy that envisions setting aside dedication formations while also institutionalizing drone usage throughout the entire force.. At the turn of the year, the service will simultaneously begin fielding tactical unmanned systems directly across three core combat branches: light infantry, reconnaissance, and armor units.

The army plans to recruit between 300 and 350 personnel for the regiment’s initial footprint in 2027 before expanding the unit to an end strength of up to 600 troops, according to Freuding. In remarks to German wire service dpa, Freuding said planners target full operational capability by 2029.

The envisioned structure comprises five or six companies, including units for close-range combat, deep strikes at ranges of up to 500 kilometers depending on commercial equipment availability, electronic warfare, counter-UAS protection, and an internal trials company intended to fast-track operational testing. The Bundeswehr also plans to equip the formation with loitering munitions, which are currently undergoing evaluation and should reach troops in 2027, according to dpa information.

Unmanned systems have fundamentally reshaped modern combat, accounting for the vast majority of casualties on the battlefield in Ukraine. Western militaries have often lagged in retrofitting their forces, slowed by peacetime procurement practices and protracted political debates over weaponized drones and autonomy.

Key procurement questions surrounding the new unmanned-tech formation remain. The defense ministry has yet to finalize a permanent basing location or award contracts for the specific long-range platforms the regiment requires.

The project seeks to develop open, modular architecture for combat aircraft and sovereign AI technology that gives the government greater control over the tech, rather than having to rely on companies for critical systems, said Col. Cédric, head of the Air Force capability-development office, in a press briefing here on Thursday.

As AI becomes more powerful, the likes of Airbus and BAE Systems in Europe and General Atomics and Anduril in the United States are leveraging the technology to develop collaborative combat aircraft, also referred to as “loyal wingmen.” While many of those projects are company-driven, the French project would keep some of the critical technology under state control.

“What Hypairion is really about is equipping the Air Force and our platforms with architectures that are open, modular and owned by the government,” Col. Cédric said. He was identified only by his first name, in line with the Armed Forces Ministry’s policy for military staff. “Our goal is to move away from proprietary systems that lock down sensors and weaponry.”

The Ministerial Agency for Defence AI will be in charge of providing sovereign AI technology for the project in several areas, particularly command and control as well as mission autonomy, said Col. Thibault, deputy director for AI applications at the agency, known as Amiad. He described mission autonomy as AI that assists pilots with mission planning, in-flight decisions and post-mission analysis.

Amiad already uses AI to coordinate different platforms in the French Army’s Pendragon robotics project, and proposes to create an industrial hub for Hypairion where both traditional aerospace firms and smaller startups can interact with the project, an approach tested in Pendragon.

“The point of the Hypairion project is for the French state to retain control of the overall architecture and to be able to integrate the most capable startups or industrial companies,” Col. Thibault said. He said companies might join and leave the project, while Hypairion retains its capabilities in-house.

The Air Force is modifying two Mirage 2000s fighters at Mont-de-Marsan airbase to become AI test beds, adding a new computer that will allow to test “all kinds of use cases” starting by the end of the year, according to Col. Cédric. Mont-de-Marsan in southwest France is home to the Escadron de chasse et d’expérimentation, a dedicated fighter squadron for testing and evaluation.

Development will be incremental, and the first stage of Hypairion won’t necessarily be about having an operational capability, but will look at areas such as energy consumption and system interfacing, Col. Cédric said. First use cases being considered include using AI to optimize flight paths or tactical decisions such as when to deploy air-to-air or air-to-ground weapons.

The unmanned aircraft set to fly in 2028 will be a test platform and may not be the future wing-man drone planned for France’s Rafale jet as part of the fighter’s future F5 standard, though the experimentation will help pick a suitable platform later in the decade, Col. Cédric said.

The DGA has set a target data of 2033 for the first version of the Rafale F5, but will work on collaborative platforms within the framework of the current F4 standard before then, said General Engineer of Armaments Sébastien, in charge of the Rafale program at the directorate.

The goal of integrating AI on the Rafale is to help crews manage the “absolutely phenomenal cognitive load” to maintain future operational superiority, he said. The armaments engineer cited the Talios laser-designation pod from Thales, set to be delivered to the armed forces in 2027, as a concrete application of AI, able to scan an area and provide a fighter crew a list of potential targets.

Col. Cédric described a hypothetical future in which a fighter crew would carry out a mission in the morning, in between missions identify an adaptation against an enemy countermeasure, and take off again in the afternoon with updated software. That will require system architectures to evolve, he said.

The French Air Force officer likened future manned and unmanned platforms to “flying computers” on which the keyboard, screen or software could be changed without compromising security. The goal of the architecture being developed within Hypairion is to separate the flight-safety aspect from the ability to carry out missions, he said.

The Air Force doesn’t envisage a future with only unmanned aircraft, for both ethical and operational reasons, according to the colonel, who said the decision to deploy weapons remains a human one, and AI can make mistakes. “Humans can be augmented or supplemented by AI, but the assessment of the operational situation, tactical judgment, and so on, these are still entirely the domain of humans.”

As the Air Force prepares the Rafale F5 standard, “a true mid-life overhaul of the aircraft,” focus areas include adequacy of hardware resources, as the system needs to be able to handle complex calculations, Sébastien at the DGA said. Another focus is system openness, meaning “the armed forces must be able to tailor artificial intelligence according to their own needs and so dispose of an open system.”

The Rafale’s F4 standard already includes an initial level of openness through a tablet connected to the mission system, and the F5 standard will seek to broaden the scope of data available to the tablet, give it access to the mission system’s computing resources, and improve the ability to interface with onboard communication systems and data links, according to the DGA engineer.

“This in particular will make it possible, and without waiting for the deployment of the F5 standard, to control autonomous combat platforms from the Rafale,” Sébastien said.

While France relies on Dassault Aviation and other major industrial partners for the Rafale to develop AI in the fighter’s major systems, the armed forces want to ensure operational autonomy, meaning having “the ability to tailor the AI to the specific operational needs of the theater,” the engineer said.

Hypairion will work on a road map covering usage concepts, doctrine, scaling up the work force as well as the actual equipment, resulting in a first full-scale trial of collaborative combat drones flying alongside fighter jets in 2028, according to Col. Cédric.

“The challenge for the Air and Space Force is ultimately to determine what a fighter squadron will look like in 2035 or 2040, once all these systems are potentially integrated into the squadron,” Col. Cédric said. “Today, it’s actually quite rare to come across computer scientists in a fighter squadron. Perhaps tomorrow, that will be a daily occurrence.”

According to the competition’s leaderboard, Neros Technologies scored highest in the confined-environment testing category. Perennial Autonomy claimed the top spot in “deep-strike” testing, in which operators launched attacks beyond the range of enemy defenses.

The Pentagon uses the companies’ rankings to determine how many drones to buy, meaning higher-scoring companies receive larger orders. In total, the department ordered 14,000 drones from Neros — which also ranked third in deep-strike testing — and 8,000 from Perennial.

Neros, founded by competitive drone racers in 2023, identified its winning design as the Archer AI drone. The company said the 10-inch model was “built with Terminal Guidance functionality that allows the drone to fly itself to an operator-selected target, a critical feature in the comms-denied environments military operators face today.”

In a statement, Soren Monroe-Anderson, Neros’ chief executive and co-founder, called the Archer “highly modular and easily adapted to end-user needs.”

“Pairing real warfighter feedback with our deep engineering talent is the reason Neros is the only manufacturer to have placed in the top three across two fundamentally different mission sets — deep strike and close-quarters battle — with the same drone platform,” he said.

The Defense Department launched Drone Dominance in December 2025, with plans to invest $1 billion directly into the domestic drone market and build up the military’s supply of commercial drones.

Since then, the Pentagon has completed one-and-a-half phases, known as “Gauntlets,” along with three operational tests. Neros has ranked second, third and first in those competitions, earning the company roughly $100 million in orders.

Perennial said its design was “tested across rigorous find-fix-finish objectives at various long-range beyond visual line-of-sight (BVLOS) distances” and flown by operators during day and night missions.

“The systems proved their operational reliability under heavily contested conditions, to deliver precise, autonomous engagement when it counted,” the company said in a press release.

Earlier this year, the Defense Department awarded Perennial a $500 million contract through Joint Interagency Task Force 401, or JIATF-401, which is responsible for researching, testing and procuring counter-drone technology for the department.

The company was founded in 2023 by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and developed the Merops interceptor for Ukrainian forces to counter Russia’s one-way attack drones.

Beginning in October, the Drone Dominance competition will enter Gauntlet 2.5, in which officials will test bomber platforms. The third phase is expected to begin next spring, with the competition scheduled to conclude next fall.

Then he played an AI-generated clip of what he meant: a robopunk mix of humanoid and crab-like ground robots skittering across a barren front line, doing work that is still too complicated for the robots Ukraine fields today.

The video laid out Fedorov’s vision for an Army of Robots, a force of two-legged upright and other ground robots that would take over many of the front line’s most dangerous but necessary jobs from soldiers.

“Our idea is to combine engineers, startups and capital into one ecosystem so we can launch humanoid-like robots on the battlefield,” Fedorov told Defense News in an exclusive interview after his presentation.

“We want to eventually substitute our infantry with these robots.”

To get there, Fedorov is calling on specialists in robotics, AI, sensors and autonomous systems to pool their talent in the kind of concentrated wartime push that built the first atomic bomb, and to focus it on the machines he says will one day replace Ukraine’s infantry.

The 35-year-old aims for the group to have its first confirmed battlefield result from a humanoid-like robot within six months and, within a year, an assault in which robots take on the most dangerous parts of a mission with no infantry alongside them.

To hit the six-month mark, there isn’t time to spend on research and development, he said, so he will begin by investing in companies with weapons that have already been tested and shown some market viability.

Fedorov wants Ukraine to seize the initiative in the war’s next technological cycle before Russia – whose far larger army and industrial base let it scale new weapons quickly – gets there first.

“Russia always thinks about new strategies, how to hack our frontlines,” he said. “We need to be the first side to hack our frontlines.”

Robots are only one of the defense tech areas that the former minister plans to develop within the new project.

“It could be robots, it could be autonomous systems,” he said. “We will have three key directions: sensors and robots, cheaper anti-jet-Shahed missiles, and AI strike drones and missiles.”

Under Fedorov’s plan, members of the Army of Robots will identify a battlefield problem, find a technical solution and a team, provide resources for development, test the product with troops in real conditions and scale what works.

It is the same model he used for the Army of Drones, which he started in 2022 as Ukraine’s digital transformation minister and which opened the market to Ukrainian drone makers, launched government procurement and operator training and helped form the first strike drone units.

“The Army of Drones … changed everything in our country and in the world and, I think, in the future of the world,” he said. “Now we are trying to build the same ecosystem for robots.”

Ukrainian troops already lean heavily on ground robots for assaults and basic tasks, carrying out more than 25,000 logistics and evacuation missions in August – 3.3 times more than in January, according to the Defense Ministry.

But most of the futuristic robot designs featured in Fedorov’s video, humanoids included, are not yet used in combat in Ukraine today, and the ground robots that are in use almost always have a human operator at the controls, usually over Starlink.

Fedorov said the ambitious effort will involve multiple companies working on different stages of the product lifecycle, with some making components, some assembling complete robots and others developing software to run them.

“We have some funds for these first companies,” Fedorov said, declining to name names. “It means that we have two or three companies that will be our partners in these directions.”

The Army of Robots will include a venture fund to invest in technology teams, its own defense-tech companies and a research and development arm, according to a press statement issued after the announcement.

The initiative comes weeks after Fedorov announced that he was starting a new defense company, with Palantir CEO Alex Karp as its first investor.

Fedorov told Defense News the company will start with a corporate fund and may later launch its own venture fund.

The biggest challenge facing the development and deployment of these next-gen robots is the necessary speed of innovation, Fedorov said.

Ukraine has to field these robots fast enough to save its infantry and stay ahead of Russia, which he said has learned to copy Ukraine’s battlefield innovations and scale them rapidly.

Ukraine, meanwhile, is heading into another winter of Russian strikes with air-defense interceptors in short supply.

The weekend Fedorov made his announcement, Russian drones hit kindergartens and university buildings in Kyiv, struck a large civilian hospital and destroyed a food market and multiple gas stations outside the city, killing at least three people and injuring dozens in a combined aerial attack that lasted days.

“We don’t have enough time,” he said. “We need to achieve these results as soon as possible.”

The 2-1 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington came in a lawsuit by Anthropic challenging its March designation by the Pentagon as a national security supply chain risk, which the startup says has cost it billions of dollars in lost business and damaged its reputation ahead of a highly anticipated initial public offering.

The court’s majority said it was reasonable for the Pentagon to designate Anthropic after it refused to allow its products to be used for autonomous weapons or mass surveillance. It rejected Anthropic’s claim that the Pentagon had retaliated against it for its views on AI safety and ethics.

Siding with Hegseth’s argument that Anthropic’s safety restrictions could compromise military operations, the majority said, “The Secretary raises the deeply sobering prospect of overly constrained AI models shutting down unexpectedly and thus causing important military operations to fail,” in an opinion by Judge Gregory Katsas.

San Francisco-based Anthropic said in a statement Friday that it respectfully disagrees with the decision but remains confident in its position and is considering its options, including review of the three-judge panel’s decision by the full appeals court.

The White House and the Department of Defense did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment.

A federal judge in San Francisco last month struck down a parallel designation under a different law, finding the administration had unlawfully retaliated against Anthropic for its views on AI safety. U.S. District Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco also blocked Trump’s government-wide ban on Anthropic and Hegseth’s order barring military contractors from doing any business with the startup.

Hegseth designated Anthropic as a risk under two different laws after Anthropic refused to remove guardrails against its technology being used for autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance.

The unprecedented move came after months of negotiations ended in failure and public recriminations by Hegseth and Trump, who accused Anthropic of endangering American lives with ideological posturing.

Anthropic denied that characterization and said AI is not yet reliable enough to be safely used in autonomous weapons. The company also said it opposes domestic surveillance as a violation of fundamental rights.

Thales announced the availability of HexaForce last week, after testing it during NATO’s Coalition Warrior Interoperability Exercise, or CWIX, in Poland in June. The company is positioning the system as a multi-domain C2 “overlay” that can plug into legacy and national systems from the strategic to the tactical level, while allowing users to choose their own AI models and avoid vendor lock-in.

NATO is increasingly turning to AI to harness growing amounts of data in command and control, and already operates a C2 system supplied by United States-based Palantir Technologies. Meanwhile, the European Union is looking to accelerate development and deployment of European capabilities amid concern about sovereign control of the technology underpinning them.

“I don’t want to go too much into detail. but we are quite advanced in some discussions with some NATO countries so far,” Moreau told Defense News in a Sept. 24 interview.

As European and NATO militaries look to scale operations from brigade-level formations to army corps of more than 100,000 troops, AI will be key to processing more complex data, shortening planning cycles and improving situational awareness, Moreau said.

HexaForce is aimed at providing command and control from the army corps level down to the battalion, according to the executive. Thales defined a goal with end users to be able to plan 1,000 target missions a day, a tenfold increase.

The system has an open architecture built around NATO standards, allowing countries to plug in existing systems for tasks such as mission planning, or use the large language model of their choice, according to Moreau. In addition to the LLM component, HexaForce includes agentic AI for tasks such as targeting mission preparation.

It has a fully distributed architecture designed to rely on mesh capability, allowing the system to be spread over different data hubs within different command posts, in line with new operational concepts to not rely on central computing, according to Moreau.

By interfacing with legacy solutions, HexaForce can add “AI-powered capability” to systems already in use by the armed forces, according to Moreau. HexaForce is a command-and-control system, and users still need dedicated tactical systems to provide sensor data, he said.

The executive said the aim at CWIX was for end users to test HexaForce and its interoperability with existing and legacy systems. The system implements NATO standards related to the Data-Centric Security and Federation Mission Networking frameworks, he said.

For threats identified at the strategic command level, HexaForce can propose different courses of action, including firing options using air or land forces, according to Moreau. The operator can then choose a course of action, with the system sending the targeting mission to the tactical level.

“Of course it remains up to the operator to choose to push the button, and to choose the best option proposed by HexaForce,” Moreau said. “There is no automated action.”

In addition to connecting to systems that provide tactical awareness, Hexaforce could include commercial ship-tracking data or cyber threats to provide a more complete picture, Moreau said.

While developed with input from the French Army, the executive repeatedly stressed that the Thales system is designed as a NATO solution rather than a France-specific system. Asked how it compares with existing systems such as Systematic’s SitaWare or Airbus’s Multi-Domain Combat Cloud, Moreau instead focused on the interoperability of the Thales system.

Moreau said HexaForce is ready and already in the hands of the armed forces, with the first version taking nine months from design to making it available to the French Army.

France is developing its sovereign C2 system Arcadia, and Moreau said that while Hexaforce could be “a cornerstone” of the French system, the decision is not up to Thales.

Major Spanish daily El Mundo published the article, which was based on testimony from an anonymous Lithuanian intelligence source, late Wednesday local time.

According to the paper, the CIA had assessed that Spain, France or Italy may be the targets of these attacks, with drones launching from international waters in the Mediterranean and traveling to the coastal countries over the course of an hour or two.

The Gerbera drone was selected because of its small size – it has a wingspan of just 2.5 meters – which allows it to be concealed easily, El Mundo wrote. The drones have a maximum range of 600 kilometers, depending on load and environmental conditions, and carry a relatively small warhead that would be effective at starting a fire, destroying exposed infrastructure components or causing political and economic turmoil.

The drones were to be transported hidden in containers, which was described as being “not difficult at all,” before being catapult-launched for their attack missions on the Western Mediterranean NATO members, according to El Mundo’s sourcing.

Lithuania and other European countries were reportedly made aware of this threat shortly after the CIA director made an unannounced and secretive visit to Moscow aboard a U.S. military plane on Aug. 25.

According to El Mundo, an key CIA report was rumored to be circulating in European leadership circles in mid-September, coinciding with French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to convene the Defense Council on Sept. 16 and then summon all party leaders and the 2027 presidential candidates to the Élysée Palace two days later.

The El Mundo report has not been independently corroborated.

The perceived threat of Russian kinetic action has increased significantly across European capitals this year, owing to heightened sabotage and hybrid warfare activity generally attributed to Moscow. Airspace violations by Russian drones along NATO’s eastern flank have become increasingly commonplace, leading to several instances of the alliance’s fighter jets shooting down intruding unmanned aerial vehicles.

A year ago, 19 unarmed Russian drones entered Polish airspace, the largest airspace violation to date, and one that was widely assessed to have been a deliberate provocation and test of NATO’s response.

The prospect of launching from Russian merchant ships has long been suspected in European policy circles, with coastal sightings of unidentified UAVs sometimes coinciding with the presence of Russian “shadow fleet” ships. In February of this year, a Swedish Navy vessel detected and jammed a drone taking off from a Russian intelligence ship in the Öresund Strait, coinciding with a visit of the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle to the Scandinavian country.

A new step on the escalation ladder was reached in early August, when an explosive-laden drone was found near a Ukrainian cargo aircraft and a separate plane collided with a drone mid-air at Germany’s Leipzig airport, a key freight hub in the NATO country. After a month-long investigation, German authorities officially attributed the attack to Russia.

On Sept. 19, the major pro-Russian Telegram channel Rybar published a map titled “Russian medicine against French arrogance,” suggesting supplying Algeria with Geran-5 drones to strike French aeronautical factories, military bases, nuclear plants and petrochemical sites, El Mundo reported.

Even non-NATO, landlocked European countries are taking note and stepping up their preparedness. The Austrian military has launched a “large exercise” to practice counter-drone measures and air defense, Austrian public media reported on Thursday. The drill will involve 300 soldiers spread across several townships in eastern Austria, as well as Mistral ground-to-air missiles, 35-millimeter cannons and electronic warfare measures.

The push comes after restrictions by the United States on satellite access in Ukraine and the Middle East over the past two years underscored the risk of dependence, executives and policy makers said at an industry conference here last week.

“Sovereignty” was a recurring theme at the World Space Business Week, held from Sept. 14 to 17 in Paris, and the two-day Space Defense & Security Summit side event.

U.S. firms touted their ability to build satellites in Europe or operate free from International Traffic in Arms Regulations, while European companies highlighted their ability to provide local clients with complete satellite systems.

“The drive to sovereignty, we all have customers that want to go there,” said Noam Segal, the chief executive officer of Israeli firm ImageSat International, or ISI. “Any of the defense customers we are dealing with can find themselves in a geopolitical situation in which one of the suppliers will not be able to deliver. I think this is the driver.”

The war in Ukraine has highlighted both the importance of satellite data on the modern battlefield and the reliance of Western militaries on U.S. suppliers for critical space capabilities. Restrictions on Starlink access in Ukraine, a halt in U.S. intelligence sharing with Ukraine in March 2025 and imagery restrictions over the Middle East in 2026 are pushing European countries to seek sovereign alternatives.

The lesson from Ukraine has been to show how critical space has become for defense, as well as “the importance of indeed not being reliant on solutions you don’t control,” said Guillaume de la Brosse, head of the defense policy and innovation unit at the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm.

He said there is a “clear imperative” to accelerate development of sovereign space-based capabilities in Europe, meaning a minimum backbone of public assets owned by either the EU or member states, and an EU-based industry able to provide sovereign services “that we can control all the time.”

“Sovereignty very much matters, this is what we’ve learned from Ukraine,” De la Brosse said. “That does not preclude the fact that we need cooperation, whatever happens, but that as a pre-requirement has sovereignty. It’s good to cut dependencies where we need to cut dependencies, and that’s very much the agenda of the upcoming years.”

Recent history showed space sovereignty is the only ultimate guarantee of having the freedom to “assess and act when conflict breaks out,” said Jean-Baptiste Paing, a deputy director at France’s Directorate General for Armament whose responsibilities include intelligence and space operations. He cited the difficulty obtaining commercial satellite communications over Afghanistan and, more recently, access to commercial imaging during the various crises in the Middle East.

The emergence of New Space, the shift from a government-dominated to a private space industry that has cut the cost of launchers and satellites, is allowing European governments to establish space sovereignty even with relatively limited budgets, executives said.

The number of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites for defense purposes, “a key priority for most nations,” is expected to increase more than fourfold through to 2035, according to industry consultancy Novaspace, which organized the conferences.

New Space provides “an incredible opportunity” for countries that didn’t have a space industry to develop their own sovereign capabilities, said Vincent Dedieu, the CEO of Sodern, a unit of France’s ArianeGroup. He said Sodern has been working with countries such as Poland, Bulgaria and Finland, which are taking advantage of New Space to catch up in both defense and commercial space.

The fact that customers are now able to own space assets at a “completely different cost point” from the past means the push for sovereign capabilities “is a strong trend that’s going to be there for the future,” according to Segal at ISI.

There is a “seismic shift” in how industry and governments deal with space capabilities, said Julia Gottfriedsen, chief technology officer at German thermal-imaging startup Constellr. She cited the example of Germany buying data from ICEYE and Rheinmetall for its brigade in Lithuania, through a service-level agreement that shifted the risk for data supply to the companies.

“So this is pretty modern and new, while in parallel, of course, the governments are also looking into procuring their own infrastructure,” Gottfriedsen said.

Executives at U.S.-based geospatial intelligence firms such as Planet Labs, BlackSky and Vantor all noted that their satellites can be delivered ITAR-free, with several highlighting their European presence or ability to manufacture their satellites outside the Untied States.

HawkEye 360 CEO John Serafini said partnerships with Italy’s Leonardo and Czechia’s ERA and having a Luxembourg subsidiary means he’s confident that “even as a U.S. company,” the firm can meet the requirement of European militaries “regardless of how those customers want the sovereignty delivered to them.”

Planet Labs cut the ribbon on a new facility in Berlin this week, and co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Robbie Schingler said the company’s first German-built Pelican satellite is set to come off the production line by the end of the year and sent into orbit on a German-built Isar Aerospace rocket launched from Norway “sometime early next year.”

Meanwhile, Finland’s ICEYE is taking sovereignty “to a whole different level” to fulfill a German order for a 40-satellite constellation, setting up a manufacturing site in western Germany controlled by a German-owned entity and keeping the entire supply chain within the country, according to CEO Rafal Modrzewski. That does require a sufficiently large order to justify the investment, he said.

For European customers that own and operate a smaller number of ICEYE satellites, such as Sweden, Finland, Poland and the Netherlands, the company is now offering a software layer that allows countries to “federate their assets at the tactical level” and borrow each other’s capabilities to cover areas of interest, Modrzewski said.

One element of sovereignty is assurance and control, another is choice, said Schingler at Planet Labs. The federation approach allows countries to network their systems for an ad hoc mission, “and that choice also gives a lot of sovereignty,” he said.

The European Commission is pushing for international cooperation to remain the way of doing things in space, including through discussions with NATO about space security, even if “that cooperation is very much challenged, and there is a need for Europeans to do much more, investing in their freedom of action,” De la Brosse said.

He said that as EU members invest heavily in space, one challenge is to avoid “renationalization of space policies,” and the commission is using the EU budget to provide an incentive to member states to coordinate investments and pool space resources rather than develop constellations without taking other member states into account.

Germany’s plan to invest a “massive” €35 billion in sovereign military space capabilities by 2030 may raise concern among some EU members that the country will “fly solo,” but the investment is a legitimate sovereign choice, said Paing at the DGA.

“I cannot speak for sovereignty myself without recognizing the same capacity in other countries, and I think it should be seen more as a model to follow for others rather than something to be afraid of,” Paing said. “That being said, I believe that this investment should nevertheless be put at the service of building a stronger Europe.”

Sovereignty also includes the ability to get satellites into orbit, executives said, with several remarking on the scarcity of launch slots. Nicolas Lefort, the head of new markets at MBDA, said France’s Toutatis project to bring a maneuverable satellite into low-Earth orbit is still waiting for a launcher.

François Lombard, the head of connected intelligence at Airbus Defence and Space, said he’s optimistic about new European players offering launchers capable of carrying one-ton payloads into LEO, citing a recent successful launch by Germany’s Isar Aerospace, as well as ArianeGroup’s MaiaSpace coming to the market “pretty soon.”

“In that case, European alternatives, which is good,” Lombard said. “There are a few satellites we cannot launch from other continents, so it’s important that we have also the sovereign access to space for this class of satellites in a competitive manner.”

Japan paid roughly $163 million for Northrop Grumman to manufacture each of its three RQ-4B Block 30i Global Hawks nearly a decade ago.

The Japan Air Self-Defense Force (JASDF) on Sept. 16 revealed that it lost contact with the high-altitude drone at 12:55 p.m., before losing its radar signature three minutes later over international waters.

The JASDF’s 502nd Squadron operates its Global Hawks from Misawa Air Base in northern Japan. Before crashing, the drone had taken off at 10.20 a.m. on an unspecified mission, with JASDF Chief of Staff Gen. Takehiro Morita only divulging, “This particular flight was not a training exercise.”

One mission for Japanese Global Hawks, which can stay aloft for 32 hours at altitudes of up to 60,000 ft, is monitoring North Korean missile launch preparations. They are also useful for keeping an eye on Chinese military activities.

Morita said a Japan Coast Guard helicopter spotted debris in the water just 50 minutes after it had lost contact. Other assets spotted further wreckage and took photos, enabling precise identification of the aircraft.

No cause of the accident was revealed.

Japan received its first Global Hawk in March 2022, with the other two arriving later that year. Their integrated payload contains an electro-optic/infrared sensor, synthetic aperture radar and ground moving target indicator.

The Global Hawk purchase was controversial in Japan given their enormous cost and the fact that the U.S. retained tight control over the aircraft’s technology and the processing of gathered data.

Global Hawks possess the longest reach of any Japanese drone, so the loss of one among such a small fleet will be sorely missed.

However, as Japan increasingly prioritizes unmanned technologies, the Japan Maritime Self Defense Force is planning to induct the first of 23 MQ-9B SeaGuardians in 2027. Although these drones have a shorter endurance and range than the Global Hawk, Tokyo will use them for maritime domain awareness.

Japan’s draft 2027 defense budget requested US$1.88 billion for the first 17 SeaGuardians. These will take over some of the missions currently performed by P-1 and older P-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft.

Incidentally, the U.S. Air Force currently has three RQ-4B Global Hawks stationed at Yokota Air Base in Tokyo, after relocating them from Guam in May to avoid the typhoon season.

The United States planned to quickly retire all its Global Hawks, but it will now keep operating them until 2033. After that, there will be only three in South Korea and two in Japan still flying.