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For many years, fighting meant deploying weapons such as tanks, planes, artillery and ammunition, built by a few advanced contractors under long-term government programs.
It also meant putting shoes on the ground.
That paradigm is not disappearing, but software is becoming the center of it. And now, more and more soldiers are fighting through computers.
The AI industry now includes everything from cloud computing to autonomous drones and decision-making software. The change stems from the US drone program of the 2000s and 2010s, which turned remote, on-screen killings into part of the way wars are fought.
Billions of dollars are pouring into a few companies that are now leading the AI revolution for the military, while the old military-industrial complex is reinventing itself as a military technology.
As part of the AI and war series, Al Jazeera takes a look at some of these companies.
Who are these companies?
On July 10, the UK Ministry of Defense he signed 2bn pounds ($2.7bn), a 15-year contract with Omnia Training, a partnership led by Raytheon UK, to train 60,000 soldiers a year using AI to make British soldiers “combat ready”.
A few days earlier, NATO contractors to run the joint Enhanced Air Command and Control Data Platform for the US military technology company Anduril for its Lattice AI program together with the US company Palantir and the French military technology company Athea SAS.
Lattice uses AI and computer vision to bring data from multiple sources into a single image.
The purchase of AI security is not new. The Pentagon’s 2014 “Third Offset Strategy” is clearly betting on AI to define the next generation of warfare, but the pace seems to be rising as global military spending rises. $2.88 trillion in 2025, governments are pouring money into defense budgets.
The latest big one sales The Pentagon has announced that it will sign contracts with eight leading companies in the world to deploy AI on public networks to become an “AI-first” military.
With wars starting from the Ukraine to the Middle East, sales like this are on the rise, and the business is growing fast – medical device companies and new entrants are rushing the market. One way to determine the evolution of this environment is to look at where companies are based business models.
Researchers at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) ranked the AI industry, classifying companies into four categories based on their role in the industry:
- Security interests: traditional military companies
- Neopries or defense startups: new companies that work in the military industry
- Big tech: tech giants with big cloud/computing power
- Who provides the first examples: frontier AI labs are building advanced AI models
Below, we show what each of these does, according to SIPRI’s analysis, and the companies in each category.
Security managers/contractors
These are long-established equipment manufacturers that have provided military equipment and weapons for decades, and are now putting AI into existing systems.
Chief among these companies are Lockheed Martin Corp, RTX, Northrop Grumman Corp, BAE Systems and General Dynamics Corp, all of which were hit. always great after the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran.
Another part of the conference shows how AI is woven into the fabric of the old military industry. In February, Lockheed Martin he announced that it was testing an AI tool for its F-35 fighter jets to help pilots quickly identify hostile aircraft. L3Harris, an American security company, has built AI directly into its camera systems for virtual reality. It is also installed by platforms like Shield AI‘s Tracker, which helps identify hostile drones. Shield AI is a US defense company building autonomous AI pilots for military aircraft and drones.
Neoprimes or security primes
The new group, which is sometimes called “neoprimes”, are companies that start software, sell special equipment in the arms market as well as police and military forces.
Palantir is perhaps the best-known name among such companies, particularly for their role in Project Maven, the Pentagon’s AI warfare program. It’s designed to speed up military decision-making, relying on AI and machine learning to sift through satellite imagery, video footage, and artificial intelligence to identify and prioritize targets.
This system is used in various conflicts, including the war in Ukraine and US-Israel War on Iran – Maven has been identified 1,000 goals in the first 24 hours of the last conflict.
A direct competitor to Maven is Anduril’s Lattice platform, which connects its devices – drones, sensor platforms, autonomous vehicles – into a single network, which is widely used by the US Army.
Great technology
Companies such as Google, Meta and Amazon Web Services (AWS), which control about 67 percent of the global market for cloud infrastructure, are increasingly connecting with military services provided by traditional security contractors.
In May, the United States Department of Defense announced a new agreement with eight tech and AI companies to use their technologies on their selected units.
Contracts with SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, Oracle and AWS were signed to “accelerate the transition to establishing the United States military as the first AI military”.
The deal has meant that these companies have been removed from the IL6 and IL7 networks, the most sensitive and sensitive areas in which the Department of Defense operates.
Basic sample providers
The last group are companies that develop basic types of AI that other companies integrate into military equipment, such as OpenAI and Anthropic in the US and Mistral AI in Europe. Chinese researchers have been developing forms of AI for military use since the early 2020s, including using Meta’s Llama model as the basis for a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) tool called ChatBIT, which was designed to gather intelligence and support decision-making in the field, according to Reuters.
Pentagon comparison China’s military spending on AI is comparable to America’s figures, about $1.5 to $2bn per year.
This year the Pentagon he added Alibaba, Baidu, BYD, NIO, RoboSense and Unitree on the list of its Chinese military companies, according to Reuters. According to the Pentagon, these companies are believed to be helping the Chinese military.
Small Chinese AI companies built by former employees of Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent have been building tools for monitoring, monitoring and military decision-making, according to 2021. report and the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET).
Many of the AI labs on the border were hostile to military use; However, in 2024 OpenAI lifted its ban on military use, and in the same year Palantir and Anthropic joined forces in a now fraught relationship. cases about how Claude is used by the US military.
