The AI Industry Is Ready to Get Rich off Trump’s Defense Department

“My request to all of you is: Please, become rich off selling to the United States Army.”

This was Army Secretary Dan Driscoll’s parting message at the end of his Exchange session at the AI+ Expo for National Competitiveness, earlier this month.

It was the first day of the annual fair hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project, a nonprofit organization committed to U.S. victory in the technological race against China. The expo took place alongside the fourth annual Exchange, a speaker series featuring more than 75 national security experts, which commemorates Ash Carter, the twenty-fifth secretary of defense. When attendees at the expo tired of hearing from Silicon Valley, they could instead listen to leaders from Donald Trump’s Defense Department mount the stage and declare that their wallets were open.

“Delivering” was the theme of this year’s Exchange—and revealed itself to be semi-coded language for the Trump administration’s aggressive embrace of acquisition reform for emerging defense technology.

In April, the president signed an executive order to modernize defense acquisitions, which included, among other things, a directive to prioritize commercially available products and services. It seems that Driscoll and George took that reform very literally, as they described buying pairs of Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses off the shelves and telling their engineers to play around with them. “See how easy it could be?” they seemed to say.

“We have been bad to partner with, we have been a bad customer. We are—we have created many of the bad habits in our industry partners that we don’t like today,” Driscoll said, grinning through his apology on behalf of the Army. He later emphasized that the Army would need to “earn the right” to do business with for-profit companies by creating “clear demand signals” and “pathways to profitability.”

Beside him on the stage was General Randy George, the Army’s chief of staff, who had his own parting message. George explained that he wanted help from companies to formulate a pitch on the government’s embrace of “agile funding” for autonomous technology.