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NEWS In missile defence news, Donald Trump has directed the Pentagon to prepare a sweeping plan on how to defend the American homeland against attacks from Russian and Chinese missiles, and other aerial threats. His “Iron Dome for America” is extremely ambitious. It calls for space-based interceptors which could knock out attacking intercontinental ballistic missiles. I think it will work. What he proposes is actually a rehash of a 1987 concept called Brilliant Pebbles. Back then there were fewer than 500 active satellites in orbit, so the idea wasn’t realistic. That is no longer the case. This has some fairly significant geopolitical implications. Aside from the militarization of satellites, any American technology that undermines the credibility of a Russian or Chinese retaliatory strike would probably induce them to expand their nuclear arsenals. Or to put nuclear weapons in space. And then there’s Elon Musk, who stands to benefit. The US military already depends heavily on SpaceX for launching national security payloads. Starship, if it works, could make the Iron Dome viable in a way that older systems never could. SpaceX, and Elon Musk, are increasingly becoming non-state actors in global defence. That is a problem for geopolitical stability. In nuclear bunker news, China is building a massive new military complex in western Beijing to protect the country’s leadership in the event of a conflict, including potential nuclear war. The roughly 1,500-acre construction site is 30km south-west of Beijing. It has deep underground tunnels and is built from heavily reinforced concrete. Military experts say that it will house large, hardened bunkers. This is the other side of the same coin. While Trump is ordering space-based missile intercept capabilities, Xi Jinping wants a better nuclear bunker. Understandably so. This isn’t just a bunker though, it’s a signal. China has spent decades building underground command networks, but the scale of this complex suggests something bigger. It implies a shift in how the Chinese leadership thinks about survivability in a high-end conflict. If their existing command structures weren’t enough, what are they now preparing for? In LLM news, OpenAI released ChatGPT Gov. It is designed to streamline government agencies’ access to OpenAI’s frontier models. OpenAI describes the new platform as more secure than ChatGPT Enterprise. It will enable government agencies, as customers, to feed “non-public, sensitive information” into OpenAI’s models while operating within their own secure hosting environments. One year ago OpenAI quietly changed its rules and removed a ban on using its chatbot for military purposes. That was a welcome u-turn. And this is the logical next step. It shows how LLMs are quickly becoming part of state infrastructure, an area of society which has hitherto been a slow adopter of new technology. This is precisely why investors have been so bullish about OpenAI. And indeed AI writ large. There is good reason to be excited. Governments are some of the biggest spenders on technology. Once adoption starts, it tends to accelerate. If AI can embed itself into critical state functions, much like cloud computing did a decade ago, then its addressable market expands dramatically. Which, in turn, means better models and greater government efficiency. FUNDRAISING Castelion, a US-based developer of long-range hypersonic strike weapons, raised a $100m Series A round, in a mix of debt and equity. Hidden Level, a US-based developer of technology to detect and track drones, raised a $65 million Series C round. Oligo Security, an Israel-based developer of cyber security software, raised a $50m Series B round. Onebrief, a Hawaii-based developer of collaborative software designed to streamline military planning and decision-making processes, raised a $50m Series C round. 8VC, a US-based venture capital firm, is targeting nearly $1bn for its new fund.
JOBS Synnada is looking for software and ML systems engineers. Disruptive Industries is looking for a technical intelligence analyst. Alpine Eagle is looking for robotics and computer vision engineers. Labrys is looking for a senior product designer. NuQuantum is looking for an AMO engineer. Marque Ventures is looking for applicants for its Fellowship Program, which integrates veterans into the fund’s operations team.
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