SpaceX Enters Secretive Pentagon Contest To Build Voice-Controlled Drone Swarm Tech: Report

Last week, we asked whether Anthropic’s AI tool, Claude, played a role in the kill chain during the U.S. Delta Force raid targeting Maduro last month. We’ve also reported on the Department of War’s search for “war unicorn” startups, and what appears to us to be the early innings of the rise of dual-use technologies – from humanoid robots to drones – reshaping the modern battlefield.

A new Bloomberg report states that Elon Musk’s SpaceX and its wholly owned subsidiary, xAI, are competing in a classified DoW contest to develop voice-controlled, autonomous drone-swarming technology. This report is based solely on “people familiar with the effort.”

The people describe the DoW content as lasting for 6 months with an end price of $100 million. The aim is to use chatbots to direct commands to drones across multiple domains, air and sea, to complete a set of missions.

The contest is jointly run by the Defense Innovation Unit and a new Defense Autonomous Warfare Group element within U.S. Special Operations Command, and remains associated with the Biden-era “Replicator” push to deploy drones on the modern battlefield.

The report highlights a potential shift for Musk: While SpaceX is already a major defense contractor in the space domain, he has supported limiting offensive capabilities for autonomous weapons and previously signed a 2015 open letter warning about AI weapon risks.

Why Musk has changed his mind on autonomous weapons remains unclear. But as we’ve shown readers, the war in Ukraine has supercharged the development of drones, ground robots, and AI kill chains, pulling 2030s-era war technology forward and leaving the world dangerously unprepared for the rise of this new war tech.

However, the DoW has recently recognized this new, challenging future, as we note that the rise of “war unicorns” is underway, with major defense primes facing an “adapt or die” moment.

xAI has been recruiting engineers with active “secret” or “top secret” clearances and has already secured DoW-related work to integrate its Grok chatbot into government systems, including a previously reported $200 million contract.

Bloomberg noted, “xAI isn’t the only advanced AI company working on the new Pentagon effort. OpenAI is supporting a successful submission from Applied.”

Related:

• Humanoid Robots Get “Brains” As Dual-Use Fears Mount

The writing is on the wall: 2030s war tech is here.