U.S. awards Striveworks $70M; Air Force fields WarMatrix

The Pentagon is moving artificial intelligence from pilot projects into daily military use, with a $70 million software deal and a newly operational Air Force wargame system. (prnewswire.com) (acc.af.mil) Striveworks said on April 15 that it signed a $70 million multi-year enterprise agreement with the U.S. government to expand its artificial intelligence operations software across defense agencies. The company said the award could give up to 950,000 eligible defense personnel access to its technology over two years. (prnewswire.com) The Air Force said on April 15 that WarMatrix became operational during the GE 26 Benchmark Wargame, which concluded March 27 after a two-week event in Alexandria, Virginia. More than 150 participants took part, including Pacific Air Forces leaders, the Air Force Warfare Center, allied planners and technical experts. (acc.af.mil) Wargaming is the military’s way of stress-testing plans before a real conflict, and WarMatrix is designed to speed that process by linking models, data and workflows in one system. The Air Force said the software uses artificial intelligence to accelerate analysis while keeping human judgment at the center of planning and adjudication. (acc.af.mil) Striveworks sells a different layer of the same stack: software for deploying, monitoring and governing artificial intelligence after a model is built. The company said its Chariot Core platform is already used across Army, Navy and combatant command programs, including U.S. European Command, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and U.S. Central Command. (prnewswire.com) The deal also appears tied to a specific Army procurement. Army Contracting Command at Aberdeen Proving Ground awarded Striveworks a $70 million firm-fixed-price contract on January 15 for Chariot software platform licenses, with work running through January 14, 2028. (envzone.com) Both announcements point to the same bottleneck: the Defense Department has funded artificial intelligence research for years, but far fewer systems have reached sustained operational use. Striveworks said the harder problem is not building models but deploying, governing and sustaining them in contested settings. (prnewswire.com) The Air Force framed WarMatrix as an upgrade to existing methods, not a replacement. During GE 26, participants ran more than six 24-hour game-time moves using physics-based modeling, and the service said the system captured decisions and evidence in a more traceable way than earlier large-scale exercises. (acc.af.mil) The next test is whether these tools stay inside exercises and software licenses or become routine parts of planning, logistics and command decisions across the services. For now, the government is paying for scale and the Air Force is declaring at least one artificial intelligence system ready for regular use. (prnewswire.com) (acc.af.mil)