Ahead of the announcement, Army officials told reporters that they’re looking to change the software buying model.

“The direction we’re moving in right now in the Army is this is going to be one of many enterprise licensing agreements that we’re looking at entering into,” Army Chief Information Officer Leonel Garciga told a small group of reporters ahead of the announcement. “I think the big thing to think about is, as kind of we move forward, we’re finding some things, we have a lot of big software packages that are out there. They’ve been bought over several years, several program offices, several commands, [but we’re] not getting a lot of parity across the board on how they’re being delivered, right? Adding a lot of complexity to the environment. And we’ve been thinking through a couple things, right? One is, how do we reduce the complexity, right? So lower overhead to acquire capability, especially software. That’s kind of the first kind of tenet.”

The next piece, he said, is to figure out how to “make it a lot easier to acquire said software, right?” 

“I think the traditional model of, hey, we’re just buying software licenses and services … in combos kind of doesn’t work in this new environment and the way that things are being delivered,” Garciga said. “So how do we add enough fidelity, right, and an approach where folks can really get the software the way they need it?” 

The final piece, one that Garciga said he as the Army CIO cares “very much about,” is reducing cost. “How do we get better buying power across the board?” he said.

The 10-year deal with Palantir is worth up to $10 billion, although Army officials noted that they’re not committed to spending that much money. The move will consolidate 75 contract vehicles as the Army looks to streamline things, they said.

“This really has been our first kind of separate sense to go in and really get a large ELA. This is one of many. But our intent is to continue to move down this path, right, to really focus on reducing that complexity, adding agility to how we buy, right, and then the last piece … which is save taxpayer dollars as much as we can,” Garciga said.

The service is in talks with other vendors for similar types of arrangements.

“We have a couple of others that are teed up that we’re either already in negotiation with or starting the conversation to start negotiations with to do this across the board,” Garciga said.

A key aim of the initiative is to get better deals from a unit cost perspective. In the civilian side of the federal government, the General Services Administration is leading a similar effort to maximize government buying power for software licenses called OneGov.

“What I see across contracts is, hey, if I have more than one contract with the same vendor, have I bought the same thing more than once in a different way or at a different price? And just from a common-sense perspective, does that really make sense?” Danielle Moyer, executive director of Army Contracting Command, told reporters.

“Starting with Palantir and as we look at other ones, we’re looking at, hey, it makes sense to make sure … we’re getting the best discounts. So just like economies of scale buy, right? If I buy one widget, it costs X amount. If I buy 100, I should get a discount. And the more I buy at scale, the more of a discount I should [get]. And also …  just in general, across this whole initiative, we’ll look at, well, how are you selling this elsewhere? Should there be clauses in the contract that say, hey, you know, if you try and sell it somewhere else, we need to come back here and look at what the rate is on this and get a discount,” Moyer said.

She noted that the Army isn’t actually obligating $10 billion to Palantir, but the deal recognizes potential growth for the services and goods that are on that contract with the multibillion-dollar ceiling. While there is a minimum spend requirement on the contracts, the Army has no obligation to buy more than it sees fit across its enterprise. 

The Army is also trying to avoid vendor lock as it shakes up its buying practices.

“The other really important thing to note there is competition for future programs and things like that will still continue to happen. So, for example, if on all these ELAs — name the vendor — if we’re specifically talking about Palantir, if Palantir chooses to compete on, you know, whatever program or weapon system in there, the chosen awardee they happen to be at, then we would obviously leverage this agreement [to get] economies of scale discounts, buys, right, that makes the volume,” Moyer said. “We would leverage our buying power in the Army to get maximum discounts. So those are probably, from a contracting perspective, the things that … we really want to make sure that we hit home, which is robust competition is still a thing.”

The Army also wants to make sure it doesn’t overbuy and acquire licenses it doesn’t need.

Officials used a food analogy, comparing previous software buying practices to all-you-can-eat buffets or combo deals where customers essentially pay for things they might not consume.

“As we look at the way we’ve done kind of historical contracting … we typically will, kind of sometimes overbuy, because we’re trying to kind of calculate what expected growth is and whatnot. So this [enterprise agreement] is meant to help shape that, to say we’re buying just in time into that growth pattern, right? So, instead of saying, OK, I need 100 licenses, I only have to buy 50 now based on the real usage versus buy 100 because that’s where we have to fix a contract that’s meant to be for a longer period of time. So shifting that mentality is to say, OK, now we could just do just in time, kind of delivery of services,” Gabe Chiulli, chief technology officer for Army’s Enterprise Cloud Management Agency, told reporters.

Officials want a more flexible range of options, sort of like an a la carte menu where they can just pick exactly what they want.

Garciga said early efforts to set the stage for the new model began during the previous administration, but he suggested that the focus on improving software acquisition at the Defense Department under the Trump administration has provided additional momentum.

“We have been working on this since November of last year. And I think that there was just an inherent understanding, you know, almost two years ago now that we needed to start moving in this direction with a handful of our vendors,” he said. “There’s been a lot of prep work and foundation being laid to have this conversation. If anything, what I’d say is the change in the environment has allowed us to move a little bit faster than we would have normally, and I think, a willing acceptance by a lot of our commercial partners to rethink the way that they integrate and work with us in the government and what our contractual agreements are going to look like moving forward. So I think … we’ve had a little bit of a catalyst over the last like quarter and a half that’s just be able to get this like really over the hump, to get a really good deal for the Army.”

Moyer said the new way of doing things will also improve transparency into what the Army is buying.

“It’s easy [to keep track] when you buy things that you can see, right? When you buy a tank, right, you can probably see the brand of the wheels on it. It’s pretty, pretty easy. Well, when you build, you know, a weapon system that might have some software in it, and that software vendor — name the vendor — is a subcontractor, we don’t always have visibility on who those are. So I think this initiative in general will provide us visibility into how often are we buying the same software that is essentially a component or a subcontractor through somebody else,” Moyer told reporters.

The Army, as a huge organization that buys a ton of software, should be able to get better deals, Garciga suggested.

“When I look across the landscape, there’s … both software and hardware procurements that we’re doing out there with major IT companies where it would be advantageous to get an enterprise agreement just to get value at scale, right? I mean, think [about] the Army [having] 1.3 million people, right? I mean, we’ve got more endpoints than some countries do,” he said.

The Army is also looking to prevent middlemen from jacking up costs for software.

“What the enterprise agreement allows us to do is to get a much better kind of understanding when we do actually compete new work on what some of those baseline costs are going to be, because we’re kind of making it so folks have to use the enterprise agreement to buy the software, as opposed to what we’ve seen traditionally, which is like, hey, somebody’s going to go out buy this, and then a company is going to go buy it … and bump our cost up considerably for the same piece of software at scale. So I think our intent, like from especially from the CIO’s office, is to focus on where we have a considerable amount of use across Army commands and Army programs, can we engage with those companies to get value at scale, right, and in no way to get in the way of competition,” Garciga said.

ELAs are also seen as a way to help the Army keep pace with fast-moving software developments.

“We don’t want to be in the business of just buying this big block of software and then, you know, three years from now, we’re trying to figure out how to modernize that. No, on the contrary, I think this puts us in a much better position to be able to get that refresh happening organically from the commercial space. And again, it’s about flexibility too, right? It’s having that CLIN [contract line item number] structure that really allows us to as things grow and shrink, have the opportunity to adjust those levers and those rheostats to get us to kind of a baseline,” Garciga said.

He continued: “The next big step, right, and I think we’re going to see this with a lot of our vendors, is this idea of, like, hardware as a service and hardware subscriptions. I think we’re going to see that come in, too. That’s one that we’re working especially for fixed and garrison locations, is where do we have opportunities to rethink where traditionally we’ve done bulk buys and then, you know, five years later, we’re trying to figure out why we can’t lifecycle maintenance it. Now we’re going to kind of as a service, right? And we’ll work with the vendor to make sure that happens. But on the software side, yeah, definitely this is a lot easier.”

Moyer said under the enterprise agreement framework, the Army would be in a position to negotiate better deals over time.

“The other thing that you know we’re working across all the enterprise agreements we’re looking at is, once we get to X number every year … then we’re going to potentially negotiate on all these either A, a true up, or B, a discount for the next year,” she said.

Garciga noted that in the past, the Army has sometimes lost the space to negotiate.

“What we’re seeing right now is, how do you build a vehicle that allows you to … true up, true down, right as the environment changes?” he told reporters. “The larger we get, the bigger the discount. And we may be here for, like, you know, X amount, and then, you know, if we go to the next level up, we’ll get an even bigger discount, right? So I think that that’s going to be the big thing, is continuing that negotiation.”

Another important aspect of the enterprise agreement framework is that it will give the Army flexibility to jump around from a capability-acquisition perspective, he noted.

“If we want to move to the next major … platform that we want to do an enterprise agreement with, and we want to get off the one we’re on, we can gracefully exit that without having kind of put a lot of capital in front that we can’t recover,” Garciga said.

Moyer said the enterprise agreements will have minimum guarantees.

“Once you meet that, you don’t ever have to use that contract again. So if any point it doesn’t make sense … to use that vehicle, there’s somebody different or better, we could always do something different,” she told DefenseScoop. “But … just using my own common sense, why wouldn’t I try and get the best deal for as long as possible and write things in there like maximum discount buys, matching commercial prices, right? So, like, not necessarily for this specific EA, but just a general EA.”

There are many vendors out there that the Army could have enterprise agreements with, officials told DefenseScoop. And, there could be opportunities for the other services or DOD writ large to pursue these types of agreements.

“The service CIOs are all talking and we’re talking with DOD CIO,” Garciga told DefenseScoop. “If you’re already a year into your negotiation, like, we’re gonna put our requirements in and you finish up. If we’re a year into our negotiation and we’re like about to award, like, hey, we’ll get your requirements agreement. So I think we’re really at this point, I think the whole department is really pushing harder to move in this direction. So this [deal with Palantir] is just one of our first off the chute kind of big ones.”

The other services could potentially piggyback off the Army.

“There are discussions that are currently ongoing and … they’ll figure out what makes sense for them,” Moyer told DefenseScoop. “But we will position ourselves to make sure that, you know, if we can use taxpayer dollars in the most efficient way possible to get the biggest discount for any of these enterprise agreements we’re working, that is what we’re going to do.”

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The move is the latest push by the department to tap into capabilities and know-how from Silicon Valley and the commercial sector.

The new corps “brings top tech talent into the Army Reserve to bridge the commercial-military tech gap” and is “designed to fuse cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation,” the Army stated in a press release.

On Friday, the service is set to swear-in Meta’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, OpenAI’s chief product officer Kevin Weil, Palantir’s CTO Shyam Sankar and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab who was previously OpenAI’s chief research officer.

Meta, which owns Facebook, recently announced a new partnership with defense tech company Anduril to develop extended reality (XR) products for soldiers.

OpenAI is the maker of the wildly popular generative AI tool ChatGPT. The Army and the Defense Department writ large are pursuing new genAI tools to boost productivity and efficiency.

Palantir is a major provider of software tools for the DOD — including the Maven Smart System — and is also developing hardware, such as the Army’s AI-enabled TITAN vehicle.

“Det. 201 is an effort to recruit senior tech executives to serve part-time in the Army Reserve as senior advisors. In this role they will work on targeted projects to help guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to complex problems. By bringing private-sector know-how into uniform, Det. 201 is supercharging efforts like the Army Transformation Initiative, which aims to make the force leaner, smarter, and more lethal,” the service stated in Friday’s press release.

The swearing-in of the four new officers “is just the start of a bigger mission to inspire more tech pros to serve without leaving their careers, showing the next generation how to make a difference in uniform,” per the release.

The Army didn’t provide additional details about how large the detachment will grow to or how fast the service will expand it by bringing in new personnel from the tech sector.

Friday’s announcement comes in the midst of a new Army Transformation Initiative that was launched in recent weeks — which is being spearheaded by Secretary Daniel Driscoll and Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George — that calls for eliminating systems that are deemed obsolete for soldiers on the battlefield in the future and procuring “dual-use” capabilities. Driscoll has advocated for buying more commercial off-the-shelf tech, among other reforms.

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“Combatant commands, in particular, have increased their use of MSS to command and control dynamic operations and activities in their theaters. In response to this growing demand, the [Chief Digital and AI Office] and Army increased capacity to support emerging combatant command operations and other DOD component needs,” a defense official said Thursday.

Questions linger, however, regarding the MSS deployment plan — and who is part of the expanded user base set to gain additional software licenses through this huge contract increase in the near term.

The Pentagon originally launched Project Maven in 2017 to pave the way for wider use of AI-enabled technologies that can autonomously detect, tag and track objects or humans of interest from still images or videos captured by surveillance aircraft, satellites and other means.

In 2022, Project Maven matured into Maven via the start of a major transition. At that time, responsibilities for most of the program’s elements were split between the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office, while sending certain duties to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. 

All three organizations running the program have been largely tight-lipped about Maven — and the associated industry-made MSS capabilities — since the transition. 

The Defense Department inked the initial $480 million, five-year IDIQ contract with Palantir for the program in May 2024. The Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground was listed as the awarding agency, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense as the funding agency. Around that time, executives at Palantir told reporters that the work under that contract would initially cover five U.S. combatant commands: Central Command, European Command, Indo-Pacific Command, Northern Command/NORAD, and Transportation Command. The tech was also expected to be deployed as part of the Defense Department’s Global Information Dominance Experiments (GIDE).

In a one-paragraph announcement on Wednesday, DOD revealed its decision to increase that contract ceiling for Palantir’s MSS to nearly $1.3 billion through 2029.

A Pentagon spokesperson referred DefenseScoop’s questions about the move to the Army.

“We raised the ceiling of the contract in anticipation of future demand to support Army readiness. Having the groundwork for the contract in place ahead of time, increases efficiencies and decreases timelines to get the licenses. No acquisition decisions have been made,” an Army official said.

That official referred questions regarding the operational use of MSS — and specifically, which Army units or combatant commands would be front of line to gain new licenses — back to the Pentagon. 

Defense officials did not share further details after follow-up inquiries on Friday. A Palantir spokesperson also declined DefenseScoop’s request for comment.

NGA Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth confirmed this week that there are currently more than 20,000 active Maven users across more than 35 military service and combatant command software tools in three security domains — and that the user base has more than doubled since January. 

Palantir also recently signed a deal with NATO for a version of the technology — Maven Smart System NATO — that will support the transatlantic military organization’s Allied Command Operations strategic command.

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This partnership between the two contractors will allow military operators to have a software-defined solution built to deploy fast and operate anywhere with Palantir’s stack running natively on Menace systems.

Menace is described as is a family of fully integrated, turnkey command, control, communications and computing capabilities for users at the tactical edge and on the move. To outpace evolving threats in contested environments, it’s designed to equip operators with automated and resilient comms, data and software.

The two companies are working on a new Menace-I configuration that supports Palantir Edge. This will allow Menace customers to access Palantir capabilities such as Gaia — a geospatial map overlay providing operations and intelligence integration — Target Workbench — a target management system that enablers users to centrally manage intelligence and target identification — and Maverick. Another system known as Menace-T, will be used for on-premises and edge customer deployments.

“The goal is simple: give people in the field access to the software they need on hardware that’s built to withstand the conditions they actually face,” Tom Keane, Anduril’s senior vice president of engineering, said in response to questions.

The U.S. military anticipates it will be operating in austere environments in the future where forces will have to move rapidly to avoid being targeted on an increasingly transparent battlefield, with limited reachback to enterprise capabilities and in congested information spaces.

“The tactical edge is where missions succeed and fail. It’s the most challenging environment- from rugged terrain and spotty communications to the extreme temperatures and external threats,” Keane said. “This partnership ensures that warfighters have near real-time information when and where they need it most. Menace provides more reliable communications pathways, portable systems to bring computing to where it is needed, and durable and rugged hardware. It’s also incredibly quick and easy to set up – and enables warfighters to be up and running in minutes.”

The two companies have been working together for some time, but Keane described this partnership as a formalization of the ongoing collaboration.

He explained that Menace systems supported Palantir software at recent field events, such as Project Convergence Capstone 5. Menace was the compute platform for Palantir software in disconnected and mobile environments and ran Andruil’s Lattice software, acting as a node within the broader Lattice mesh network and demonstrating how multiple tools can operate side-by-side in a single system.

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Through the contract, which was finalized March 25, the NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCIA) plans to use a version of the AI system — Maven Smart System NATO — to support the transatlantic military organization’s Allied Command Operations strategic command.

NATO plans to use the system to provide “a common data-enabled warfighting capability to the Alliance, through a wide range of AI applications — from large language models (LLMs) to generative and machine learning,” it said in a release, ultimately enhancing “intelligence fusion and targeting, battlespace awareness and planning, and accelerated decision-making.”

Neither party commented on the terms of the deal, but it was enough to drum up market confidence in Palantir, whose stock rose about 8% Monday morning. NATO, however, said the contract “was one of the most expeditious in [its] history, taking only six months from outlining the requirement to acquiring the system.”

Ludwig Decamps, NCIA general manager, said in a statement that the deal with Palantir is focused on “providing customized state-of-the-art AI capabilities to the Alliance, and empowering our forces with the tools required on the modern battlefield to operate effectively and decisively.”

Palantir’s commercialized Maven Smart System plays into the growing need for an interconnected digital battlespace in modern conflict powered by AI. The data-fusion platform served as a core element of the Pentagon’s infamous Project Maven. However, NATO warned in its release that it shouldn’t be confused with the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Maven program, though the company’s AI is a component of the greater NGA program’s infrastructure

The U.S. Department of Defense’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command Control (CJADC2) attempts to do this by connecting disparate systems operated by the U.S. military and international partners under a single network to enable rapid data transfer between all warfighting domains. Palantir has already inked a $480 million deal with the Pentagon to support those efforts with Maven. Last September, the company also scored a nearly $100 million contract with the Army Research Lab to support each of the U.S. military services with Maven Smart System.

Meanwhile, the contract with the U.S.-based Palantir comes as NATO has become one of the recent targets of President Donald Trump’s ire because he believes other members of the alliance aren’t committing enough of their spending to the organization’s collective defense, saying in March: “If they don’t pay, I’m not going to defend them.”

NATO’s Allied Command Operations will begin using Maven within the next 30 days, the organization said Monday, adding that it hopes that using it will accelerate further adoption of emerging AI capabilities.

“ACO is at the forefront of adopting technologies that make NATO more agile, adaptable, and responsive to emerging threats. Innovation is core to our warfighting ability,” said German Army Gen. Markus Laubenthal, chief of staff of NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, the military headquarters of ACO. “Maven Smart System NATO enables the Alliance to leverage complex data, accelerate decision-making, and by doing so, adds a true operational value.”

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The service published a request for information in November that sought comments on the organization’s vision for the so-called ADP 2.0 — including plans to sign on multiple companies that can offer additional easy-to-use data analytics tools and support the platform’s growing number of users. Now, officials are taking responses from both the RFI and input given during a recent industry day to craft a final request for proposal, with the intent to award initial contracts sometime this year.

David Markowitz, the Army’s chief data and analytics officer, told DefenseScoop the overarching goal for ADP 2.0 is to create flexibility to scale on-demand.

“ADP 2.0 is really about, how do we have multiple vendors [and] a task order process that we can get kind of a fair price across a range of capabilities — from very simple data pipelines [that can] give me some legacy data and package it in a nice way as a data product, to more complicated user experiences,” he said in an interview.

The platform is a follow-on to the service’s current ADP, which has become more popular among Army users since it was first introduced in 2018, Markowitz said. It features a suite of six data platforms, including Vantage — a data analytics platform built by Palantir that leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to assist decision-making.

Vantage originally focused on personnel and combat readiness, but has since become the enabling software system in ADP with around 45,000 active users. In December, the Army awarded Palantir a contract extension worth up to about $400 million for four years to continue supporting the program.

But Markowitz emphasized ADP’s success has created increased demand for the platform across the entire service, prompting the Army to pivot to a multi-vendor contracting scheme. The broad vision is to onboard different companies with various “no-code/low-code” AI toolsets and commercial-off-the-shelf products that users can easily purchase for their specific mission needs.

The Army doesn’t know exactly how many vendors it wants to have contracted for ADP 2.0, but it’s considering ways to allow companies to cycle on and off the program as technology changes and new capabilities are developed.

“If you’ve got a task order, we can easily assign it rapidly but still have some level of competition and best value,” Markowitz said. “We don’t want too many [vendors], because that would slow down that type of separate task order. And we don’t want too few, because we want some view of what we have.”

While the November RFI inquired about what specific capabilities industry could provide to ADP 2.0, it also asked for suggestions on how the Army should structure the contract — either through an other transaction authority or a multi-award task order ID/IQ, for example — to support the program’s goal of flexibility.

Some of the biggest feedback from industry has been how the Army can effectively buy both tools and professional services from vendors, Markowitz noted. 

“Once we have the platforms, you’d rather use other contracting vehicles to get professional services,” he said. “So, we’re trying to explore how to first get a new platform for a new data area and allow [for that] assisted acquisition … to try to make that work.”

Another point of issue for industry has been defining what exactly a task order under ADP 2.0 means, as some missions might require more complicated data analytics and integration work than others. Moving forward, the Army plans to include a range of task orders that clearly distinguishes between different requirements, he added.

Markowitz said the Army’s initial plan was to publish a final RFP by late February or early March and for contracts to be awarded a few months after.

“We’ve gone on this growth strategy of more and more Army becoming a digital Army, a data-driven Army. And the scale and how we have our vendors available to meet the rapid needs of the Army is key to that for our future,” he said.

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Under the agreement, federal customers using Palantir’s Foundry system — a software-based data analytics platform that leverages AI and machine learning to automate decision-making — will be able to request data labeling services from Enabled Intelligence. The goal of the partnership is to improve the accuracy of custom AI models built by users by providing them with higher-quality datasets to create and test them with.

“By bringing the Palantir Platform and Enabled Intelligence’s labeling services together in highly secured environments, we believe this will streamline the full cycle of AI model creation and deployment, ensuring that our clients can leverage more precise and actionable insights from their data,” Josh Zavilla, head of Palantir’s national security arm, told DefenseScoop in a statement.

Enabled Intelligence employs a cadre of experts dedicated to annotating multiple data types — including satellite imagery, video, audio, text and more — at a much faster rate than other players in the market, the company’s CEO Peter Kant told DefenseScoop. The impetus for starting Enabled Intelligence came from a gap in the government’s access to accurately labeled data that it needs to train AI models, he said.

“We focus a lot on the quality and the accuracy of the data,” Kant said in an interview. “The better quality of the labeled data, the better and more reliable the AI model is going to be.”

Through the new partnership, government customers are now able to send specific datasets that may need additional labeling directly to Enabled Intelligence’s analysts, Kant explained. Once the data is annotated, the company can push it back to the original users through Foundry so that it can be used to build more accurate artificial intelligence models.

“It’s fully integrated into our labeling pipeline, so we automatically create labeling campaigns to the right people — our employees who know that ontology and know how to do that work with that phenomenology — [and] label it there within Foundry,” Kant said.

The company’s services would be particularly beneficial if a U.S. adversary or rogue actor begins deploying new capabilities that aren’t already included on a training dataset. For example, if American sensors capture imagery indicating that Houthi fighters are using a new small commercial drone as an attack vector, AI models developed for the Maven Smart System or other similar programs might not initially have the right data to support an appropriate response, Kant explained.

While improving the quality of AI has clear advantages for users, Kant emphasized that it can also reduce the overall power needed to run those models. He pointed to the open-source large language model (LLM) developed in China, known as DeepSeek, and claims by its developers that the platform’s performance is comparable to Open AI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini with only a fraction of compute — partly because its developers focused on training data that was well labeled.

“Our customers — especially on the defense and intelligence side — say, ‘Hey, we’re trying to do AI at the edge, or we’re trying to do analysis at the edge.’ You can’t put 1600 GPUs on a [MQ-1 Predator drone], so how do we do this?” Kant said. “One of the ways of doing that has been to really focus on making sure that the data going in is of high quality and can be moved around easily.”

The ability to run AI models with less compute would be particularly beneficial for operators located in remote environments, where it can be difficult to build the necessary infrastructure needed to power them, he added. 

“Now we want to use [LLMs] for some real critical systems activities for these missions, and the recognition that the data that goes in and how it’s used to train [AI] and how good it is, it’s been critical — not just in terms of reliability, but also how much compute we need,” Kant said.

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The teaming initiative, which the companies are calling a “consortium,” is emerging as the firms separately continue to rack up big contract wins with the Pentagon.

For example, just this week, the Defense Department announced that its Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) awarded Anduril a $100 million other transaction agreement to scale its “edge data integration services capabilities” for the DOD. The company is also heavily involved in the Pentagon’s Replicator initiative, which aims to field thousands of drones and counter-drone systems to counter China’s military buildup in the Indo-Pacific.

Earlier this year, Palantir landed a $480 million contract award for its Maven Smart System, which is expected to give U.S. military combatant commands expanded access to data integration and artificial intelligence tools to aid battlespace awareness and targeting. The company also won a $178 million deal with the Army for the next phase of its Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN) ground station program, which has been touted as the “first AI-defined vehicle.”

The Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit in April announced that it awarded deals to Anduril and Palantir to develop software system integration architectures that could aid the Army’s Robotic Combat Vehicle program.

Looking ahead, by pairing some of their respective capabilities via their new partnership announced Friday, the contractors aim to address two key challenges for the U.S. military: data readiness and processing data at scale, according to a joint press release.

“Our goal is to deliver the technological infrastructure, from the edge to the enterprise, that can enable our government and industry partners to transform America’s world-leading AI advancements into next-generation military and national security capabilities,” the firms stated in the release.

“Most useful national security data — government data that are collected and created by sensors, vehicles, weapons, and robots at the tactical edge — are not retained for AI training and algorithm development. Exabytes of defense data, indispensable for AI training and inferencing, are currently evaporating,” company officials wrote. “Even with national security data that are retained, no secure enterprise pipeline exists to turn that data into AI capabilities. U.S. companies are developing world-leading models but struggling to deploy them at scale with government partners for defense applications.”

To tackle these issues, executives plan to combine Anduril’s Lattice software platform and Menace family of expeditionary command, control, communications and computing (C4) platforms with Palantir capabilities such as its AI Platform (AIP) and Maven Smart System.

“Lattice connects directly with third-party defense systems at the edge, delivers autonomy to machine operations, securely distributes their information across a large-scale data mesh, and backhauls all tactical data into government enclaves for the purposes of AI training and inferencing. Menace devices are also purpose-built for the tactical edge, customized down to the silicon level for the unique requirements of national security operations in tactical environments — including, soon, next-generation encryption,” according to the release.

Integrating Palantir’s AIP with Anduril’s “edge capabilities” is being touted as a means of boosting the delivery of cloud-based data management and the development of artificial intelligence tools.

Migration to the cloud is a key component of the Pentagon’s IT modernization plans, as officials look to improve data-sharing, storage, handling and other tasks. The U.S. military also needs to leverage data to train its artificial intelligence systems.

Palantir’s AIP technologies will “enable the structuring, labeling, and preparation of defense data for AI training and development at all levels of classification, including Secure Compartmented Information (SCI) and Special Access Programs (SAP),” and help AI developers conduct “imitation and reinforcement learning,” according to the release issued Friday.

Via Palantir’s Maven Smart System, Pentagon officials aim to significantly grow the user base of technology that will enable the department to achieve a future warfighting construct known as Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2), with a goal of better connecting the platforms, sensors and data streams of the U.S. military and key international partners to improve decision-making, operational effectiveness and efficiencies.

The Maven Smart System “provides an enterprise mission command platform that integrates large-scale operational data and utilizes AI-based capabilities to improve and accelerate human decision-making across joint missions, such as intelligence and fires,” per Friday’s release. “Similarly, Anduril’s Lattice software platform provides an edge-based mission autonomy platform that integrates directly with robotic systems and utilizes AI-based capabilities to automate and orchestrate their conduct of joint missions, such as air defense and reconnaissance. Anduril and Palantir are joining these complementary systems together, providing a seamless operational capability from the edge to the enterprise that serves as a deployment platform for new AI applications that anyone can build. This platform is already in place and in use by Anduril and Palantir for their own corporate purposes and with government contracts that enables this work to begin immediately.”

Other industry partners may be invited to join the consortium in the future, the document noted.

Meanwhile, the forthcoming inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance next month could be a further boon for Palantir and Anduril, especially if it leads to an increase in defense spending for military modernization efforts.

“My big league support for Donald Trump is no secret,” Anduril founder Palmer Luckey wrote in a post on X in May.

Peter Thiel, who co-founded Palantir, has ties with JD Vance.

“The growth of our business is accelerating, and our financial performance is exceeding expectations as we meet an unwavering demand for the most advanced artificial intelligence technologies from our U.S. government and commercial customers,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp wrote in a letter to shareholders published Nov. 4, the day before the presidential election.

As of the morning of Dec. 6, Palantir’s stock has shot up more than 30% over the past month in the wake of Trump’s victory, according to Forbes.

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Much is still to be determined regarding the final Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN) — to include how it will be employed and by whom — which will be shaped by upcoming experimentation. But officials know for certain that it won’t be pure fleeting, or giving the same system to all types of units across all theaters, a trend seen across many different capability portfolios for the Army.

“The one-size-fits-all approach, which we’ve done for years, does not work. We are going to provide the Army with modular open systems that are tailorable depending on what a commander needs,” Col. Chris Anderson, project manager for intelligence systems and analytics at program executive office for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors, said in an interview at the annual AUSA conference. “I know going in that not every commander wants a 5-ton truck with a giant antenna farm towed along with it. They want something lighter or they want something that’s not truck based at all. Light units want smaller than a JLTV [Joint Light Tactical Vehicle]. We’re really going to leverage this prototyping period and the authorities that we have to do prototyping to give the Army options and really inform requirements. I think that’s one of the big benefits of doing prototyping.”

The TITAN program began with pre-protypes delivered to the Pacific and Europe around 2022 to help inform the final effort. The platform is essentially a truck aimed at collecting and disseminating intelligence to the battlefield from national and joint assets in once place. It will be manned by intelligence analysts from various disciplines, with data collected and processed by the system provided to other command-and-control systems for targeting and situational awareness.

The system comes in an advanced variant designed for division and above, providing direct access to more sensor data at higher classification levels, and a basic variant designed for division and below, prioritizing survivability, mobility and enabling secure but unclassified-encrypted communications.

In March, Palantir — primarily a software company — won the prime contract for the program with a team of Anduril, Northrop Grumman — which provided the pre-prototypes and is helping with platform integration — and Pacific Defense. The first Palantir prototype was delivered to Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, in July for the Multi-Domain Task Force, where troops will begin training with it.

One of the recent examples for why a single system shouldn’t be fielded across all units and theaters, comes from when the system was deployed in the Middle East, then sent to the Philippines and the humidity of the Pacific created problems that the Army hadn’t necessarily foreseen or experienced in the desert.

The service plans to use various experimentation efforts to help inform the future of the program — such as production — and concepts to include where it will reside on the battlefield.

“From a PM perspective, we’re learning about the capabilities and what it can and can’t do. If we shrink an antenna, how does that affect performance? Then we’re informing commanders and decision makers,” Anderson said. “The value of prototyping [is] we’re really zeroing in on how many of these the Army needs and what do they need to look like, who’s going to use them where? That’s — it’s really beyond materiel developer, it’s really up to the Army to figure out.”

The service released a request for information in August to ask for industry input regarding future production. The notice asked for advice on recommended hardware configurations for both variants, software development approaches, Modular Open Systems Approach compliance, how companies would approach systems integration and software intellectual property strategies, among others.

Anderson said it will be a mix of industry input and experimentation that will inform the way ahead.

“We were trying to keep a very modular approach to this. Antenna technology … advances every day. We just want to make sure we’re not locking ourselves into a design too prematurely. We want to get the best available compute and antenna technology and radios, whatever the latest and greatest is,” he said. “Again, it goes to, I don’t think we’re going to have a pure fleet of TITANs. They’re all going to look a little bit different, just because they’re going to get tailored to whatever that unit is doing. That’s okay and it’s uncomfortable for the Army because that’s not how we’ve done things.”

While Anderson said it’s probably pretty settled that the advanced variant will be mounted to the Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles with a tow array of antennas for the theater and maybe corps, what’s less clear is what below corps and divisions need. Maybe a capability at the brigade level will be necessary.

For example, U.S. Army Special Operations Command is interested in what Anderson called a “lunchbox TITAN,” where troops could have a laptop-based capability with a satellite uplink. That isn’t necessarily in the offing just yet, Anderson said, but he predicts there will be Humvee or infantry fighting vehicle variants that are smaller than the current JLTV basic design.

While the first prototype at Lewis-McChord will be employed by the Multi-Domain Task Force, Anderson said it’s important to get the system to other units to test out and provide more data for how it’ll be used.

The Army has quarterly decision cycles for what the TITAN prototype priorities are.

“We need a really broad mix of units. We need light units, heavy units, focused on different regions. We’re being very deliberate, the Army is being very deliberate about … where we place each prototype, just based on what we need to learn out of that,” he said. “It’s a deliberate three-star-level decision on, okay, where is the next one going and why, and what are our learning demand?”

He noted there should be a decision next month on where the second prototype will go, but the Army isn’t trying to plan too far in advance given how quickly things change.  

The program office is gearing up for an operational test toward the end of fiscal 2026 that will support a production decision. Leading up to that test, the Army’s Requirements Oversight Council will approve the final requirements for the system.

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The Army awarded Palantir a $178.4 million other transaction agreement in March for the Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN). The system is a critical modernization component for the service’s multi-domain operations concept because it will integrate various types of data from numerous platforms — such as space, high-altitude aerial and terrestrial — to help commanders make sense of a fast-moving and complex battlefield. The effort is unique in that it’s one of the first major programs steeped in artificial intelligence, with a software vendor acting as the prime. In fact, Project Linchpin, the Army’s first program-of-record AI operations pipeline, will first be focusing on the TITAN system.

While Palantir is working on building and delivering prototypes — the first of which was delivered to Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, in July — the Army is conducting market research to better understand how production and fielding of the system would work for possible future contract opportunities.

For that effort, the Army is estimating a production run from fiscal 2026-2031 and an investment of $1-1.5 billion dollars, according to a spokesperson from the program office.

The request for information posted by the Army lists the possibility of 94 total TITAN systems for production divided between approximately 36 advanced and 58 basic variants. The program spokesperson added that these numbers are potential quantities and the fielding plan to identify what units receive which variants is still in development.

Under its contract, Palantir is to deliver 10 prototypes over 24 months, consisting of five advanced and five basic variants.

The advanced variants are designed for division and above, providing direct access to more sensor data at higher classification levels. The basic variants are designed for division and below, prioritizing survivability, mobility and enabling secure but unclassified-encrypted communications.

Areas where the Army is looking for industry input regarding future production include recommended hardware configurations for both variants, software development approaches, Modular Open Systems Approach compliance, how companies would approach systems integration and software intellectual property strategies, among others.

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