Head of Army Cyber Command Lt. Gen. Christopher Eubank on Monday at the Association of the United States Army conference in Washington gave an approximate timeline for when the service would be delivering the new unit devoted to the exact same mission as the 11th Cyber Battalion, dubbed the Leviathans.

“It should start standing up in earnest within the next couple months, and it will be an exact replica of the 11th Cyber Warfare Battalion,” Eubank said.

The new battalion will achieve initial operating capability within the next year and from there work toward full operational capability, according to the Cyber Command leader.

The battalion is currently working on behalf of Joint Task Force–Southern Border, providing radio frequency-enabled cyber effects as directed by the division commander, Eubank said.

The Leviathans was activated on Oct. 16, 2022, as the first scalable expeditionary capability to handle the Army’s current and future cyberspace objectives.

It was built with the specific intention of rolling out non-lethal and non-kinetic effects that include cyberspace and electronic warfare assets.

Its previous iteration, the 915th Cyber Warfare Battalion, was activated on June 6, 2018, before being renamed during the 11th Cyber Battalion’s activation.

At the time of the battalion’s creation, the Army said it planned to have 12 expeditionary teams it could deploy under the 11th Cyber Battalion by September 2027.

The service has labeled the battalion the first of its kind.

“Just as Gen. Patton led the modernization of tank warfare into WWII, the leaders and soldiers of the 11th Cyber Battalion spearhead concept development for the delivery of CEMA [cyber electromagnetic activity] combat power to the tactical edge of the contemporary battlefield,” said Lt. Col. Lou Etienne, who led the 11th Cyber Battalion until June 25.

Developers from 11th Cyber Command worked alongside the Cyber Solutions Development unit within the 780th Military Intelligence Brigade to develop new drone technology between July 2025 and July 2026.

The partnership project was performed to support the Army’s “Transforming in Contact” initiative, which delivers new unmanned technology to soldiers to track their feedback in real time as they utilize it in the field.

The 11th Cyber Battalion also participated in a demonstration at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, from August. 5-8, simultaneously deploying three new Army technologies and proving their efficacy in diffusing electromagnetic threats from enemies.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth addressed AUSA attendees at the Project Agincourt panel on Wednesday, sharing that the Pentagon is requesting roughly $50 billion in reconciliation funding to support the push to scale autonomous and robotic systems.

This request is part of an effort to make the technology available in far greater numbers.

The figure is separate from the Pentagon’s fiscal 2027 budget request, which includes $53.6 billion for the Drone Dominance initiative. That request covers $16.9 billion for unmanned-system procurement, $14.4 billion for counter-unmanned systems, $13.5 billion for contested logistics, $4.5 billion for collaborative autonomy and $4.3 billion for institutional systems and personnel. The budget request does not establish that the reconciliation funding Hegseth cited is the same money or that it is dedicated entirely to drone purchases

Hegseth characterized the funding as a one-time investment rather than a recurring annual allocation, intended to accelerate the development and production of autonomous and robotic systems.

“Ultimately we will be dealing with hundreds of thousands of one-way attack systems this year and into the millions in years to come at a pace that this department’s never ever seen before.”

The Defense Secretary said the Pentagon must make it easier for new companies to compete in a defense market long dominated by established contractors and costly platforms. Traditional defense firms remain important, he said, but the department also needs lower-cost systems that can be manufactured at scale.

The Army’s Drone Dominance program offers a concrete measure of that ambition. In a December 2025 announcement, the Army said a $1 billion initiative would fund approximately 340,000 small unmanned aircraft systems for combat units over two years. The service said it expected to deliver tens of thousands of drones in 2026 and hundreds of thousands by 2027.

Acting Army Secretary Adam Telle said the service is broadening access to its programs for companies outside the traditional defense industrial base. The Army, he said, must make room for new entrants while continuing to work with established suppliers.

Telle also described plans to coordinate the Army’s autonomous-systems efforts while distributing capabilities to operational units. The service is developing an approach that incorporates drones, autonomous ground systems, autonomous fires and autonomous lift into future combat operations.

“We have an MOS in the Army, 390A, where warrant officers could keep the speciality and the skills over the duration to teach our soldiers how to do robotics,” Telle added.

Expanding access to Army test ranges is another part of that effort, Telle said. Greater access gives developers more opportunities to test systems and receive feedback from military users. He also described efforts to share lessons across the force rather than have individual units and organizations solve the same problems independently.

Hegseth said the department must remove bureaucratic barriers that slow the adoption of new technology, telling the panel, “I want you to tell me which rules can be signed away.” He urged officials to identify rules and directives that could be changed without involving new legislation to accelerate progress.

The service will pay a one-year total of $93.6 million, spread out across nine companies, to create applications for its Next Generation Command and Control, or NGC2, software.

“While the Army is providing capability we can deploy today, we’re also providing a blueprint and reference point for how industry can integrate in the future with interoperability and speed,” said Brig. Gen. Shane Taylor, portfolio management executive for the Command and Control Information Network.

The NGC2 will provide a shared network for technologies, weapons, sensors, devices and applications to operate within that will increase decision-making speed on the battlefield.

The chosen companies include General Dynamics Mission Systems, Air Space Intelligence Federal, Immersive Wisdom, LMI, Mente Systems, Stilman Advanced Strategies, Onebrief, Rune Technologies and AIR.

The applications will be hosted on the common data baseline, or software foundation, that Anduril Industries, Palantir, Raft and Striveworks have built in collaboration with the Army.

The NGC2 system, in conjunction with the applications the companies build for it, will allow information sharing that streamlines mission completion across the Army’s six warfighting functions of command and control, fires, intelligence, movement and maneuver, sustainment and protection, the service said.

The Army is currently in the process of delivering the NGC2 software to the I Corps, which commands service members in the Indo-Pacific.

The move will further test NGC2 software’s ability to host technologies and devices separated by thousands of miles, some in communication-contested environments.

The Army has spent the last year moving from the experimental phase to the fielding phase of NGC2, going from prototype development to placing software in the hands of soldiers at the 4th and 25th Infantry Divisions.

In July 2026, the Army hosted a 10-day event at Fort Irwin, California, entitled Project Convergence-Capstone 6, that asked 10,000 participants from U.S. and allied forces as well as industry partners using 90 technologies to test software for the NGC2.

The service conducted a joint force exercise shortly after in May at Fort Irwin that marked the end of the NGC2 prototype phase and came away stating that the new platform was ready to be scaled up.

The Army awarded Anduril Industries a $162.8 million contract on Sept. 30 worth up to 1.8 billion to continue refining the NGC2’s common data baseline, or software foundation.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

The concern, critics say, is not limited to weapons that can select and engage targets on their own.

At the hearing, titled “Artificial Intelligence in the Military Domain: Implications for Human Rights,” witnesses told members of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission that AI can influence human decisions leading to a strike while leaving the individual formally responsible for the final call.

“The approval button alone does not demonstrate the control,” Anna Mysyshyn, a Ukrainian AI-governance researcher, told lawmakers.

The issue comes as the Pentagon pushes to use AI to accelerate military decision-making. The Pentagon’s 2023 AI adoption strategy identified “fast, precise and resilient kill chains” as a desired outcome, while its 2026 AI strategy calls for becoming an “AI-first” warfighting force by redesigning military workflows and operational concepts around current AI capabilities.

Mysyshyn questioned whether a person supervising multiple AI-enabled systems can recognize an incorrect recommendation and intervene fast enough before harm occurs. She cited Ukraine as an example of AI compressing decisions from hours to minutes.

In many scenarios, a human making the final decision does not necessarily have enough information, time or the ability to challenge the system’s recommendation, she said.

The Defense Department’s 2023 directive on autonomy in weapon systems requires autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.

Wednesday’s testimony focused on a broader question: whether that judgment remains meaningful if AI is influencing targeting faster than a human can authenticate.

Amanda Klasing, national director of government relations and advocacy at Amnesty International USA, warned that AI can compress the military “kill chain” in ways that make it difficult to determine whether meaningful human discernment actually occurred before a strike.

Joseph Chapa, a former military officer and scholar of military ethics, argued that the debate should not focus solely on how autonomous a system is. He urged policymakers to consider whether an AI system relies on statistical inference, what happens when it fails in a particular operational environment and whether its decisions can be audited afterward.

Statistical AI systems can fail differently from traditional software, Chapa said, including producing substantially different outputs from relatively small changes in inputs. More complex systems can also make it difficult to reconstruct how a particular recommendation was produced after the fact.

He called for greater AI education across the military, including specialized training for personnel working with targeting and intelligence systems.

Witnesses on Wednesday also pointed to a larger accountability problem: determining what happens when an AI-assisted decision results in civilian harm.

The Defense Department established its Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan in 2022, including a Civilian Protection Center of Excellence intended to serve as a hub for analysis and training. Federal law requires the Pentagon to operate the center.

But a Defense Department inspector general review released in May assessed the department’s implementation of the civilian-harm framework and found problems including the loss or reassignment of personnel, the end of funding for a civilian-harm data-management platform and the failure of a senior steering committee to continue meeting.

That matters in the case of AI because, as Klasing noted, the military currently has limited ability to determine whether AI may contribute to improper targeting of civilians.

On the first day of the U.S.-Iran war, a Tomahawk cruise missile struck Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, southern Iran. At least 168 people were killed — more than 100 of them under the age of 12, according to UN and Iranian officials.

The school building sat fewer than 100 yards from a long-time Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval installation and was previously located within the IRGC compound perimeter until a wall appeared between 2013 and 2016, according to an analysis of satellite imagery by Amnesty International.

By the time the U.S. and Israel launched their first strikes on Feb. 28, the school had been established several years prior. It was active on social media and had its own website, a Reuters investigation found.

More than 120 House Democrats sent a letter to the Pentagon on March 12, demanding clarity on whether artificial intelligence, “including the use of the Maven Smart System, [was] used to identify the Shajareh Tayyebeh school as a target.”

U.S. military investigators in the wake of the incident stated that the strike was likely carried out by U.S. forces. The Pentagon, however, has still not released its investigative findings.

Klasing proposed adding information about AI involvement to the Pentagon’s annual civilian-casualty reports required under Section 1057 of the National Defense Authorization Act. The existing reporting requirement calls for information about civilian casualty mitigation efforts and investigations, but does not specifically require the department to identify whether AI contributed to an incident.

Steve Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the Pentagon should collect data from military operations and conduct after-action reviews to determine whether AI-assisted systems accurately identified intended targets and whether errors contributed to civilian casualties.

“A bigger question is to what extent is the Pentagon collecting data and verifying the target accuracy of all these 1000s of strikes?” Feldstein said.

Feldstein also cautioned against treating AI itself as the source of every potential problem. AI can be used to help verify intelligence, detect changes in imagery and prioritize defensive responses to threats such as drones and ballistic missiles.

But if a human-influenced system is built around assumptions that certain demographic traits make someone a lawful target, Mysyshyn said, AI would not correct that underlying premise.

Feldstein similarly pointed to the rules humans establish before an AI system is used. If commanders determine that a particular level of civilian harm is acceptable in pursuit of a military objective, he said, the machine is operating within a human-defined framework.

The challenge is particularly acute when systems operate faster than people can meaningfully assess recommendations.

The commission opened Wednesday’s hearing with an example from Iraq. In 2004, Army squad leader Nick Ellison encountered two young men firing a machine gun from a car during a census patrol in Kirkuk.

Ellison made eye contact with one of the men, saw panic and ordered his soldiers to hold fire. The men turned out to be brothers of a newly married groom, and the gunfire was celebratory.

Mysyshyn said testing should examine bias, reliability, civilian protection, realistic time pressure, whether operators can interrupt systems and whether decisions can be traced throughout an AI system’s lifecycle.

Chapa said some AI systems may be difficult to audit after the fact, while Deborah Brown of Human Rights Watch said information about military AI use has often emerged through investigative reporting and whistleblowers rather than government disclosures.

The growing challenge, according to witnesses, is no longer making a machine pull a trigger, but whether the human who approves the trigger pull has enough time, information and authority to make a meaningful choice before disaster.

Military Times reporter Katie Livingstone contributed to this report.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the project will pave the way for the launch of a Starlink-like system for the nation.

“The culmination of the process that began today can and will be a Polish Starlink,” Tusk said Sept. 9 at the MSPO defense show in Kielce, referring to SpaceX’s satellite network. “Anyone closely following the Russian-Ukrainian war knows how important communications are. It is absolutely critical. Without communications, you have nothing to look for on the modern battlefield.”

In a statement, PGZ said that the program is to be implemented from 2026 to 2030.

ICEYE has an ongoing cooperation with PGZ on an Earth observation system for the Polish Armed Forces. The Finnish company has delivered synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites to the country’s military under its MikroSAR program. The system is designed as the first component of the military space capabilities toolkit Warsaw plans to develop in the coming years. The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine has fueled Poland’s efforts to ramp up its reconnaissance ability.

“The cooperation is to draw on the experience gained through the MikroSAR program and is to include the development of a space segment based on a distributed architecture, the development of domestic ground infrastructure, and the establishment of industrial capabilities enabling the system to be independently developed and maintained in Poland,” PGZ said.

The Finnish manufacturer said in a statement that its collaboration with the Polish group is to be based on the partners’ complementary roles.

“ICEYE will act as the technology partner, while PGZ will contribute its industrial and organizational capabilities,” the space company said. “ICEYE will be responsible for developing the satellite system architecture, designing and manufacturing the space platforms, and conducting satellite operations. PGZ’s role will be to organize the program’s domestic industrial base by identifying the group’s companies that will contribute their production capabilities, expertise and technical infrastructure.”