Friday, October 16, 2026

Pentagon seeks smarter, self-organizing drones as autonomous-warfare budget is poised to skyrocket

Two requests to industry may help the Pentagon address one of the emerging challenges of warfare: enabling a relatively small number of human operators to direct a far larger number of robots. The Materials for Physical Compute in Untethered Robotics effort seeks to make autonomous systems more intelligent, while Decentralized Artificial Intelligence through Controlled Emergence…

The next president must reimagine, not just restore, the administrative state

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg recently addressed the issue of what happens after the Trump administration’s assault on America’s administrative state is over. The work needed to restore the country’s governing capacity, he argued, involves more than just putting the bureaucratic Humpty Dumpty back together again.  The next president can’t “go around and just find…

Teaching my sister to split and chop wood.
Crazy Build

Teaching my sister to split and chop wood.

Teaching my sister to split and chop wood. She did better than I thought actually! This video is from some footage we filmed during a family visit a few weeks ago. #family #familyvisit #firewood #choppingwood #woodchopping #woodsplitting #offgridliving

Trump’s assumptions are running his Iran policy aground—again

President Trump’s April 21 decision on to extend his original two-week ceasefire with Iran, less than 12 hours after he expressed reluctance to do precisely that, is giving the U.S. and Iran more time to salvage a diplomatic process defined by misleading statements, rhetorical chest-thumping, and conflicting agendas. While shooting has stopped for the time being, the…

Former head of ‘Pentagon’s think tank’ joins Anthropic

The United States has “a tight time window to adapt” to the “civilizational" challenge of AI, according to a former senior Pentagon thinker who's joining Anthropic as a “strategist-in-residence.” James Baker led the Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment—often referred to as the “Pentagon’s Think Tank”—from 2015 to 2025, when it was temporarily closed by the Trump administration. At Anthropic—the…

7 AI firms cleared to provide tools for classified Pentagon networks

Seven leading AI developers have deals to install tools in classified Defense Department networks, a wide spread meant to prevent "vendor lock," Pentagon officials said Friday. Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Reflection, and SpaceX are cleared for Impact Level 6 and Impact Level 7 network environments, part of a bid to streamline data synthesis, improve warfighter decision-making, and increase situational…