"The big difference is that instead of writing code, answering emails, or buying stuff online, Scout AI's agents are designed to seek and destroy things in the physical world with exploding drones. In a recent demonstration, held at an undisclosed military base in central California, Scout AI's technology was put in charge of a self-driving off-road vehicle and a pair of lethal drones."
""We need to bring next-generation AI to the military," Colby Adcock, Scout AI's CEO, told me in a recent interview. (Adcock's brother, Brett Adcock, is the CEO of Figure AI, a startup working on humanoid robots). "We take a hyperscaler foundation model and we train it to go from being a generalized chatbot or agentic assistant to being a warfighter." Adcock's company is part of a new generation of startups racing to adapt technology from big AI labs for the battlefield. Many policymakers believe that harnessing AI will be the key to future military dominance. The combat potential of AI is one reason why the US government has sought to limit the sale of advanced AI chips and chipmaking equipment to China, although the Trump administration recently chose to loosen those controls."
Scout AI retrains large foundation models to autonomously control ground vehicles and explosive drones that locate and destroy physical targets. A demonstration at a central California military base showed a self-driving off-road vehicle and two lethal drones finding and destroying a hidden truck with an explosive charge. The company frames hyperscaler models as trainable into agentic combat systems and joins startups adapting civilian AI advances for battlefield use. Policymakers see AI as critical to future military dominance, prompting restrictions on advanced AI chips, while operationalizing large models remains technically difficult due to unpredictability.
Read at WIRED
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