One afternoon in late November, I visited a weapons test site in the foothills east of San Clemente, California operated by Anduril, a maker of AI-powered drones and missiles that recently announced a partnership with OpenAI. I went there to witness a new system it’s expanding today, which allows external parties to tap into its software and share data in order to speed up decision-making on the battlefield. If it works as planned over the course of a new three-year contract with the Pentagon, it could embed AI more deeply than ever before into the theater of war. 

Near the site’s command center, which looked out over desert scrubs and sage, sat pieces of Anduril’s hardware suite that have helped the company earn its $14 billion valuation. There was Sentry, a security tower of cameras and sensors currently deployed at both US military bases and the US-Mexico border, and advanced radars. Multiple drones, including an eerily quiet model called Ghost, sat ready to be deployed. What I was there to watch, though, was a different kind of weapon, displayed on two large television screens positioned at the test site’s command station. 

I was here to examine the pitch being made by Anduril, other companies in defense-tech, and growing numbers within the Pentagon itself: A future “great power” conflict—military jargon for a global war involving competition between multiple countries—will not be won by the entity with the most advanced drones or firepower, or even the cheapest firepower. It will be won by whichever entity can sort through and share information the fastest. And that will have to be done “at the edge” where threats arise, not necessarily at a command post in Washington. 

A desert drone test

“You're going to need to really empower lower levels to make decisions, to understand what's going on, and to fight,” Anduril’s CEO Brian Schimpf says. “That is a different paradigm than today,” where information flows poorly among people on the battlefield and decision makers higher up the chain. 

To show how it will fix that, Anduril walked me through an exercise of how its system would take down an incoming drone threatening a base of the US military or its allies (the scenario at the center of Anduril’s new partnership w...