#defense-contracting

#defense-contracting

The modern battlefield is increasingly defined by software. To maintain our advantage, we must be able to acquire and deploy software capabilities with speed and efficiency.

We ended the year with a record $1.85 billion in backlog, representing 73% year-on-year growth, a figure we look forward to building upon in 2026. That backlog includes an $816 million SDA contract to build 18 satellites for the Tracking Layer Tranche 3 program, the largest single contract in company history, plus selection for the Missile Defense Agency SHIELD program, with potential contracts up to $151 billion.

Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are investing in a Florida-based drone company called Powerus that "is vying to meet fresh demand from the Pentagon" for drones that started when the Trump administration banned foreign-made drones and drone components from the US in December.

For years, Anthropic has distinguished itself from peers by embracing a safety-first stance. Its flagship model, Claude, was designed with guardrails that explicitly prohibit use in fully autonomous lethal weapons or domestic surveillance. Those restrictions have been central to the company's identity and its appeal to customers wary of unfettered AI.

The contract language we received overnight from the Department of War made virtually no progress on preventing Claude's use for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons. New language framed as compromise was paired with legalese that would allow those safeguards to be disregarded at will. Despite DOW's recent public statements, these narrow safeguards have been the crux of our negotiations for months.

This morning, in advance of a meeting between Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, my colleague Hayden Field and I published a story about the Pentagon's hardball contract renegotiations with Anthropic. The stakes are higher than it should reasonably be, with the Pentagon continuing to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk.

John Conafay, a veteran of the US Air Force, has spent most of his career leading business development at public and private aerospace companies, including Spire, Astranis, and ABL Space Systems. At each company, Conafay ran into the same software hurdle: collaborating on government contracts was a logistical mess that forced his teams and their federal counterparts to rely on a tedious back-and-forth of PDFs and Excel files.

Billions of dollars are at stake in this battle. The Pentagon is preparing to spend $9.4 billion on aerial combat drones in fiscal year 2026 as part of its larger $13.4 billion investment in autonomous systems. Furthermore, the Air Force is seeking $789.4 million for research and development of autonomous "loyal wingmen" drones that can fly and fight alongside crewed combat aircraft or carry out missions alone. The Department of Defense also aims to invest $3.1 billion in counter-drone technology.

Amid a burgeoning artificial intelligence (AI) landscape, giving investors an overabundance of stocks trying to capitalize on the technology's potential, BigBear.ai ( ) delivers AI-powered analytics and decision intelligence solutions primarily for defense, government, and commercial sectors. Because its platforms integrate vast datasets to provide real-time insights, serving clients in government and enterprise in areas like national security, logistics, and border management, BigBear is frequently compared to Palantir Technologies ( NASDAQ:PLTR ). For example, BBAI's tools, such as ConductorOS, echo Palantir's Gotham and Foundry in enabling predictive analytics and operational efficiency.

A leader of a company gathering steam as a data and artificial intelligence provider to the Defense Department has been arrested for allegedly soliciting an underage girl for sex. Eric T. Gillespie, the founder and chairman of Govini, has been charged as part of a sting operation by the Pennsylvania attorney general's office and the Lebanon County, Pennsylvania district attorney's office.

The defense industry has had nearly a decade of warnings, but today (Monday, Nov. 10) marks the day that companies need to start complying with the government's standards around how they protect controlled unclassified information. Of course, they should have been complying with the National Institute of Standards & Technology's SP 800-171 standard for the last eight years. But now the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification program begins in earnest.

Just a few years ago, space startups were selling investors on visions of a rapidly expanding commercial market for weather monitoring, broadband, and remote-sensing satellites. Astra, for example, told investors in its 2021 SPAC deck that it would eventually launch hundreds of rockets per year to serve a growing small satellite market. Relativity Space pitched investors on a 3D printing revolution that would make rockets cheap enough to unlock large commercial demand.

The platform ingests data from multiple sensors, such as air, land, sea, and space-based imagery and signals, to detect battlefield threats like drones, enemy positions, or other targets. FPS does all of that in a no-code, hardware-agnostic environment that lets the average soldier in the field "build, retrain, and deploy custom machine learning models at the edge without coding," according to the company. Most critically, FPS is designed to operate without a connection to the internet or cloud services.

Doing business with the Department of Defense is complicated, former insiders say. There are startups that are leveraging data work and AI to simplify the process.