Palantir Secures Battlefield AI Contract with US Army

Palantir has secured a $178.4 million contract from the US Army to install a combat intelligence system inside a large truck.

Palantir will supply systems for the TITAN “ground station,” which is intended to access space, high altitude, aerial, and terrestrial sensors to “provide actionable targeting information for enhanced mission command and long range precision fires,” as stated in a Palantir statement. This is allegedly the Army’s first AI-defined vehicle.

The acronym TITAN, which stands for Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node, appears innocuous enough. Whoever died at the hands of a node?

“Maximize usability for soldiers, incorporating tangible feedback and insights from soldier touchpoints at every step of the development and configuration process” is how the TITAN solution is designed, according to the statement.

The TITAN project seeks to establish a novel means of bringing together military hardware and software companies. These include Palantir and “traditional and non-traditional partners” of the United States military, including Northrop Grumman, Anduril Industries, L3Harris Technologies, Pacific Defense, SNC, Strategic Technology Consulting, and World Wide Technology.

The fiery CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, told Bloomberg that TITAN was a natural progression of Maven, a contentious project in which Palantir is a partner and which Google infamously withdrew from after staff members objected. Maven used machine learning and engineering to distinguish between people and objects in drone footage.

“People who’ve built software products that have been used on the battlefield and used commercially” are the partners in TITAN, according to Karp.

It is difficult for institutions to absorb that basic realization that is evident on the battlefields in Israel and the Ukraine. ‘We’re going to fight for real, we’re going to put the best on the battlefield, and the best is not just one company,’ is essentially what this move implies, making it one of the most momentous [for] the Pentagon. It’s a group of individuals under the direction of Palantir, the world’s most well-known defense software vendor,” he stated.

TITAN was characterized as the Army’s first intelligence ground station enabled by artificial intelligence and machine learning on the news website of the non-profit Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association International in December of last year.

The Army’s program executive officer for sensors, electronic warfare, and intelligence, General Ed Barker, told the newspaper Titan that an expeditionary intelligence ground station that is scalable will be developed to supply fused sensor data that “enables long-range precision fires.”

Palantir is the winning bidder for the NHS Federated Data Platform, a contentious project that the government thinks would help recover the care backlog resulting from the pandemic. However, Palantir’s ties to the US and other armed forces have sparked worries in the UK.