Trump tech strategy boosts drones, snubs open-weight AI
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- White House tech strategy names undersea, space, and AI/autonomy as priority areas for military research, listing multi-agent systems and swarm intelligence as "critical" for Indo-Pacific deterrence against China.
- Pentagon acquisition reforms push buyers toward performance-based contracts and other transaction authorities (OTAs), bypassing traditional purchasing pathways in favor of "faster non-traditional approaches that may involve higher risk."
- Younger defense tech companies gain from new reforms to foreign military sales rules, export controls, and "streamlined pathways" via Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs) and Agreements for Commercializing Technology (ACTs) with federal agencies.
- Foundation models — large language, multimodal, and world systems — are listed as "critical," while open-weight models and open-source software development are omitted entirely from the strategy.
- Michael Schiffer, a Scalare Advisors partner and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for East Asia, argued in the article that China's open-weight AI advances "expose the limits of a U.S. strategy built too heavily on the idea of denying them access to American technology and American markets."
- The Replicator program for low-cost drones is cited as an essential pathfinder but received only $1 billion in funding — evidence, the article argues, that previous drone efforts were "uneven at best."
- Jake Steckler of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reports that Ukraine's computational architecture — Western cloud access, domestic data centers, and forward-deployed nodes — is "already straining" as the country integrates more AI into targeting and coordination.
Why it matters: The strategy entrenches a foundation-model approach that concentrates AI resources among a few large labs (OpenAI, Anthropic) and their cloud backers, while sidelining cheaper open-weight alternatives where China is advancing; only 18% of Americans view AI as a positive force, a public-sentiment backdrop that officials fear could undermine congressional and financial support for the U.S. military's AI edge.
Ask SkimNews
