Air Force Awards $8.6M AI Contract
The Department of the Air Force has awarded an $8.6 million contract to Istari Digital. The funding is for an initiative called Industry Øne, which is designed to break down digital engineering barriers and accelerate digital transformation across the U.S. defense industrial base.
Istari Digital is led by founder and CEO Dr. Will Roper, who previously served as the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics from 2018 to 2021. The company, backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, aims to create an "engineering metaverse" where technology is developed and tested digitally before being physically built. The "Industry Øne" initiative builds on two prior Air Force programs with Istari. The first, "Flyer Øne," is a $19.1 million project to create the world's first digitally-certified aircraft, aiming to prove a digital design can meet real-world performance and safety standards. The second, "Model Øne," is a $15 million contract to link the Air Force's various models and simulations to tackle the challenges of "internetized" warfare. Industry Øne is designed to scale these previous efforts across the entire Defense Industrial Base, tackling long-standing issues that slow down innovation. Defense programs often rely on thousands of suppliers who use incompatible digital tools and operate behind separate secure firewalls, making collaboration slow and risky. The core problem is that sharing data currently requires manual copying and transfers, which creates version control issues and security vulnerabilities. Istari's platform creates an "Internet of Models" that allows different organizations to have their engineering models interact in a controlled, secure way without centralizing or copying the data, maintaining security and data ownership. Roper compares the vision for this new digital infrastructure to "Git across guarded firewalls," referencing the popular version control system used by software developers. This approach is intended to bring the speed and agility seen in industries like Formula 1, where thousands of digital designs are tested virtually, to the defense sector.
