Trump Tech Strategy Backs Drones, Omits Open-Source AI
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- The White House's new tech strategy pushes faster military development of emerging technologies, gives defense innovators more room to experiment, and broadens the federal market for young defense tech startups.
- Pentagon buyers are directed to bypass traditional acquisitions in favor of performance-based contracts and other transaction authorities (OTAs), with the strategy also targeting export controls that have hobbled defense tech sales to allies.
- Undersea, space, and AI/autonomy are designated as priority research areas, with "multi-agent systems and swarm intelligence" called critical for deterring China in the Indo-Pacific.
- The strategy lists "Foundation models, including large language, multimodal, and world systems" as critical but entirely omits open-weight models and open-source software development, while including niche concepts like brain-computer interfaces.
- Michael Schiffer, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for East Asia and partner at Scalare Advisors, calls the omission "a huge oversight and a potential gift to China" given Beijing's advances in open-weight AI.
- Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei frames the foundation model race as driven by "raw scale—more compute and more data," concentrating power among a handful of frontier AI labs and their cloud backers like OpenAI.
- Jake Steckler of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reports Ukraine's computational architecture is "already straining" under AI integration, while just 18% of Americans believe AI will be a positive force for the U.S.
Why it matters: Schiffer, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for East Asia, calls the omission 'a huge oversight and a potential gift to China' — a warning grounded in Beijing's open-weight AI advances and a Pentagon computational architecture Jake Steckler of Carnegie says is 'already straining' under current AI integration.
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