At the start of 2024, OpenAI’s rules for how armed forces might use its technology were unambiguous.
The company prohibited anyone from using its models for “weapons development” or “military and warfare.” That changed on January 10, when The Interceptreported that OpenAI had softened those restrictions, forbidding anyone from using the technology to “harm yourself or others” by developing or using weapons, injuring others, or destroying property. OpenAI said soon after that it would work with the Pentagon on cybersecurity software, but not on weapons. Then, in a blog post published in October, the company shared that it is working in the national security space, arguing that in the right hands, AI could “help protect people, deter adversaries, and even prevent future conflict.”
Today, OpenAI is announcing that its technology will be deployed directly on the battlefield.
The company says it will partner with the defense-tech company Anduril, a maker of AI-powered drones, radar systems, and missiles, to help US and allied forces defend against drone attacks. OpenAI will help build AI models that “rapidly synthesize time-sensitive data, reduce the burden on human operators, and improve situational awareness” to take down enemy drones, according to the announcement. Specifics have not been released, but the program will be narrowly focused on defending US personnel and facilities from unmanned aerial threats, according to Liz Bourgeois, an OpenAI spokesperson. “This partnership is consistent with our policies and does not involve leveraging our technology to develop systems designed to harm others,” she said. An Anduril spokesperson did not provide specifics on the bases around the world where the models will be deployed but said the technology will help spot and track drones and reduce the time service members spend on dull tasks.
OpenAI’s policies banning military use of its technology unraveled in less than a year. When the company softened its once-clear rule earlier this year, it was to allow for working with the military in limited contexts, like cybersecurity, suicide prevention, and disaster relief, according to an OpenAI spokesperson.
Now, OpenAI is openly embracing its work on national security. If working with militaries or defense-tech companies can help ensure that democratic countries dominate the AI race, the company has written, then doing so will not contradict OpenAI’s mission of ensuring that AI’s benefits are widely shared. In fact, it argues, it will help serve that mission. But make no mistake: This is a big shift from its position just a year ago.
In understanding how rapidly this pivot unfolded, it’s worth noting that while the company wavered in its approach to the national security space, others in tech were racing toward it.
Venture capital firms more than doubled their investment in defense tech in 2021, to $40 billion, after firms like Anduril and Palantir proved that with some persuasion (and litigation), the Pentagon would pay handsomely for new technologies. Employee opposition to working in warfare (most palpable during walkouts at Google in 2018) softened for some when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 (several executives in defense tech told me that the “unambiguity” of that war has helped them attract both investment and talent).
So in some ways, by embracing defense OpenAI is just catching up. The difference is that defense-tech companies own that they’re in the business of warfare and haven’t had to rapidly disown a legacy as a nonprofit AI research company. From its founding charter, OpenAI has positioned itself as an organization on a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. It had publicly vowed that working with the military would contradict that mission.
Its October 24 blog post charted a new path, attempting to square OpenAI’s willingness to work in defense with its stated values. Titled “OpenAI’s approach to AI and national security,” it was released the same day the White House issued its National Security Memorandum on AI, which ordered the Pentagon and other agencies to ramp up their use of AI, in part to thwart competition from China.
“We believe a democratic vision for AI is essential to unlocking its full potential and ensuring its benefits are broadly shared,” OpenAI wrote, echoing similar language in the White House memo. “We believe democracies should continue to take the lead in AI development, guided by values like freedom, fairness, and respect for human rights.”
It offered a number of ways OpenAI could help pursue that goal, including efforts to “streamline translation and summarization tasks, and study and mitigate civilian harm,” while still prohibiting its technology from being used to “harm people, destroy property, or develop weapons.” Above all, it was a message from OpenAI that it is on board with national security work.
The new policies emphasize “flexibility and compliance with the law,” says Heidy Khlaaf, a chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute and a safety researcher who authored a paper with OpenAI in 2022 about the possible hazards of its technology in contexts including the military. The company’s pivot “ultimately signals an acceptability in carrying out activities related to military and warfare as the Pentagon and US military see fit,” she says.
Amazon, Google, and OpenAI’s partner and investor Microsoft have competed for the Pentagon’s cloud computing contracts for years. Those companies have learned that working with defense can be incredibly lucrative, and OpenAI’s pivot, which comes as the company expects $5 billion in losses and is reportedly exploring new revenue streams like advertising, could signal that it wants a piece of those contracts. Big Tech’s relationships with the military also no longer elicit the outrage and scrutiny that they once did. But OpenAI is not a cloud provider, and the technology it’s building stands to do much more than simply store and retrieve data. With this new partnership, OpenAI promises to help sort through data on the battlefield, provide insights about threats, and help make the decision-making process in war faster and more efficient.
OpenAI’s statements on national security perhaps raise more questions than they answer. The company wants to mitigate civilian harm, but for which civilians? Does contributing AI models to a program that takes down drones not count as developing weapons that could harm people?
“Defensive weapons are still indeed weapons,” Khlaaf says. They “can often be positioned offensively subject to the locale and aim of a mission.”
Beyond those questions, working in defense means that the world’s foremost AI company, which has had an incredible amount of leverage in the industry and has long pontificated about how to steward AI responsibly, will now work in a defense-tech industry that plays by an entirely different set of rules. In that system, when your customer is the US military, tech companies do not get to decide how their products are used.
A company best known for sucking up industrial waste gases is turning its attention to food. LanzaTech, a rising star in the fuel and chemical industries, is joining a growing group of businesses producing microbe-based food as an alternative to plant and animal products.
Using microbes to make food is hardly new—beer, yogurt, cheese, and tempeh all rely on microbes to transform raw ingredients into beloved dishes. But some companies are hoping to create a new category of food, one that relies on microbes themselves as a primary ingredient in our meals.
The global food system is responsible for roughly 25% to 35% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions today (depending on how you tally them up), and much of that comes from animal agriculture. Alternative food sources could help feed the world while cutting climate pollution.
As climate change pushes weather conditions to new extremes, it’s going to be harder to grow food, says LanzaTech CEO Jennifer Holmgren. The company’s current specialty, sucking up waste gases and transforming them into ethanol, is mostly used today in places like steel mills and landfills.
The process the company uses to make ethanol relies on a bacterium that can be found in the guts of rabbits. LanzaTech grows the microbes in reactors, on a diet consisting of gases including carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen. As they grow, they produce ethanol, which can then be funneled into processes that transform the ethanol into chemicals like ethylene or fuels.
A by-product of that process is tons of excess microbes. In LanzaTech’s existing plants where ethanol is the primary product, operators generally need to harvest bacteria from the reactors, since they multiply over time. When the excess bacteria are harvested and dried, the resulting powder is high in protein. Some plants using LanzaTech’s technology in China are already selling the protein product to feed fish, poultry, and pigs.
Now, LanzaTech is expanding its efforts. The company has identified a new microbe, one they hope to make the star of future plants. Cupriavidus necator can be found in soil and water, and it’s something of a protein machine. The company says that after growing, harvesting, and drying the microbes, the resulting powder is more than 85% protein and could be added to all sorts of food products, for either humans or animals.
Roughly 80 companies around the world are making food products using biomass fermentation (meaning the microbes themselves make up the bulk of the product, rather than being used to transform ingredients, as they do in beer or cheesemaking), according to a report from the Good Food Institute, a think tank that focuses on alternative proteins.
The most established efforts in this space have been around since the 1980s. They use mycelial fungi, says Adam Leman, principal scientist for fermentation at the Good Food Institute.
Other startups are starting to grow other options for food products, including Air Protein and Calysta in the US and Solar Foods in Europe, Leman says. LanzaTech, which has significant experience raising microbes and running reactors, hopping into this space is a “really good sign for the industry,” he adds.
Making food with microbes would use less land and water and produce fewer emissions than many protein sources we rely on today, particularly high-impact ones like beef, Holmgren says. While it’s still early days for bacteria-based foods, one recent review found that mycoprotein-based foods (products like Quorn, made from mycelial fungi) generally have emissions lower than or similar to those of planet-friendly plant-based protein products, like those produced from corn and soy.
LanzaTech is currently developing prototype products with Mattson, a company that specializes in food development. In one such trial, Mattson made bread using the protein product as a sort of flour, Holmgren says. As for whether the bread tastes good, she says she hasn’t tried it yet, as the company is still working on getting the necessary certification from the US Food and Drug Administration.
So far, LanzaTech’s efforts have been relatively small-scale—the company is operating a pilot facility in Illinois that can produce around one kilogram of protein product each day. The company is working to start up a pre-commercial plant by 2026 that could produce half a metric ton of product per day, enough to supply the protein requirements of roughly 10,000 people, Holmgren says. A full-scale commercial plant would produce about 45,000 metric tons of protein product each year.
“I just want to make sure that there’s enough protein for the world,” Holmgren says.
Google DeepMind has unveiled an AI model that’s better at predicting the weather than the current best systems. The new model, dubbed GenCast, is published in Nature today.
This is the second AI weather model that Google has launched in just the past few months. In July, it published details of NeuralGCM, a model that combined AI with physics-based methods like those used in existing forecasting tools. That model performed similarly to conventional methods but used less computing power.
GenCast is different, as it relies on AI methods alone. It works sort of like ChatGPT, but instead of predicting the next most likely word in a sentence, it produces the next most likely weather condition. In training, it starts with random parameters, or weights, and compares that prediction with real weather data. Over the course of training, GenCast’s parameters begin to align with the actual weather.
The model was trained on 40 years of weather data (1979 to 2018) and then generated a forecast for 2019. In its predictions, it was more accurate than the current best forecast, the Ensemble Forecast, ENS, 97% of the time, and it was better at predicting wind conditions and extreme weather like the path of tropical cyclones. Better wind prediction capability increases the viability of wind power, because it helps operators calculate when they should turn their turbines on and off. And better estimates for extreme weather can help in planning for natural disasters.
Google DeepMind isn’t the only big tech firm that is applying AI to weather forecasting. Nvidia released FourCastNet in 2022. And in 2023 Huawei developed its Pangu-Weather model, which trained on 39 years of data. It produces deterministic forecasts—those providing a single number rather than a range, like a prediction that tomorrow will have a temperature of 30 °F or 0.7 inches of rainfall.
GenCast differs from Pangu-Weather in that it produces probabilistic forecasts—likelihoods for various weather outcomes rather than precise predictions. For example, the forecast might be “There is a 40% chance of the temperature hitting a low of 30 °F” or “There is a 60% chance of 0.7 inches of rainfall tomorrow.” This type of analysis helps officials understand the likelihood of different weather events and plan accordingly.
These results don’t mean the end of conventional meteorology as a field. The model is trained on past weather conditions, and applying them to the far future may lead to inaccurate predictions for a changing and increasingly erratic climate.
GenCast is still reliant on a data set like ERA5, which is an hourly estimate of various atmospheric variables going back to 1940, says Aaron Hill, an assistant professor at the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, who was not involved in this research. “The backbone of ERA5 is a physics-based model,” he says.
In addition, there are many variables in our atmosphere that we don’t directly observe, so meteorologists use physics equations to figure out estimates. These estimates are combined with accessible observational data to feed into a model like GenCast, and new data will always be required. “A model that was trained up to 2018 will do worse in 2024 than a model trained up to 2023 will do in 2024,” says Ilan Price, researcher at DeepMind and one of the creators of GenCast.
In the future, DeepMind plans to test models directly using data such as wind or humidity readings to see how feasible it is to make predictions on observation data alone.
There are still many parts of forecasting that AI models still struggle with, like estimating conditions in the upper troposphere. And while the model may be good at predicting where a tropical cyclone may go, it underpredicts the intensity of cyclones, because there’s not enough intensity data in the model’s training.
The current hope is to have meteorologists working in tandem with GenCast. “There’s actual meteorological experts that are looking at the forecast, making judgment calls, and looking at additional data if they don’t trust a particular forecast,” says Price.
Hill agrees. “It’s the value of a human being able to put these pieces together that is significantly undervalued when we talk about AI prediction systems,” he says. “Human forecasters look at way more information, and they can distill that information to make really good forecasts.”
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
How the Ukraine-Russia war is reshaping the tech sector in Eastern Europe
It might have been hard a few years ago to imagine soldiers heading to battle on oversized toys made by a tech startup with no military heritage. But Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s attacks has been a miracle of social resilience and innovation—and the way the country has mobilized is serving both a warning and an inspiration to its neighbors.
In the desperate early days of the war, Ukrainian combat units wanted any equipment they could get their hands on, and they were willing to try out ideas—like a military scooter—that might not have made the cut in peacetime.
But while governments and companies alike are investing billions into defense tech, some experts warn that Europe has only partially learned the lessons from Ukraine’s resistance. And, if it wants to be ready to meet the threat of attack, it needs to find new ways of working with the tech sector. Read the full story.
—Peter Guest
This is our latest Big Story—MIT Technology Review’s most important, ambitious reporting on technologies that are coming next and what they will mean for us and the world we live in. Check out the rest of the section here.
The startup trying to turn the web into a database
What’s new: A startup called Exa is pitching a new spin on generative search. It uses the tech behind large language models to return lists of results that it claims are more on point than those from its rivals, including Google and OpenAI.
Exa already provides its search engine as a back-end service to companies that want to build their own applications on top of it. Now it’s launching the first consumer version of that search engine, called Websets.
What’s the goal here? The aim is to turn the internet’s chaotic tangle of web pages into a kind of directory, with results that are specific and precise. It’s aimed at power users who need to look for things that other search engines aren’t great at finding, such as types of people or companies. Read the full story.
—Will Douglas Heaven
MIT Technology Review Narrated: Beyond gene-edited babies
In the future, CRISPR will get easier and easier to administer, potentially opening up paths for tinkering with human evolution. What will that mean for our species?
This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we’re publishing each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 The US is struggling to kick Chinese hackers out of its networks Six months after its investigations into their intrusions began. (Axios) + Authorities are advising concerned users to switch to encrypted apps. (WP $)
2 Russia is using civilians as target practice for its killer drones Creating an atmosphere of psychological terror for Ukraine’s residents. (FT $) + Meet the radio-obsessed civilian shaping Ukraine’s drone defense. (MIT Technology Review)
3 Can anyone topple Nvidia? Many have tried, but none—yet—have succeeded. (NYT $) + China is claiming the US-made chips pose a security risk. (Reuters) + Meanwhile, Apple is using Amazon’s custom chips for its search. (CNBC) + Amazon has lofty plans for a colossal AI supercomputer made of chips. (WSJ $)
4 Mark Zuckerberg is hankering for an ‘active role’ in Trump’s administration It sounds like the former enemies could be on the verge of burying the hatchet. (The Guardian) + Meta’s claims that it previously ‘overdid’ moderation will be music to Trump’s ears. (Insider $) + Trump offered billionaire Stephen Feinberg the job of deputy defense secretary. (WP $)
5 Inside Chicago’s ambitious plans to become a quantum hub It’s carving its own path away from Silicon Valley. (WSJ $) + Quantum computing is taking on its biggest challenge: noise. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Abortion policy in America is at a stalemate The ability to travel for reproductive care is the next frontier. (The Atlantic $)
7 Why we should think carefully about geoengineering Blocking sunlight isn’t without risks. (Undark Magazine) + The inadvertent geoengineering experiment that the world is now shutting off. (MIT Technology Review)
8 The unstoppable rise of raw milk RFK has become the poster boy for the unpasteurised movement. (NY Mag $) + Raw milk could also act as a vehicle for bird flu right now. (MIT Technology Review)
9 What happens when you fall in love with an AI? These people have firsthand experience of just that. (The Verge)
10 What sweat can teach us about our health A lot more than you might think. (New Scientist $)
Quote of the day
“I can’t give you a running commentary on conversations I was not part of.”
—Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, plays coy when asked by the Verge about Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg’s recent dinner with President-elect Donald Trump.
The big story
How this Turing Award–winning researcher became a legendary academic advisor
October 2023
Every academic field has its superstars. But a rare few achieve superstardom not just by demonstrating individual excellence but also by consistently producing future superstars.
Computer science has its own such figure: Manuel Blum, who won the 1995 Turing Award—the Nobel Prize of computer science. He is the inventor of the captcha—a test designed to distinguish humans from bots online.
Three of Blum’s students have also won Turing Awards, and many have received other high honors in theoretical computer science, such as the Gödel Prize and the Knuth Prize. More than 20 hold professorships at top computer science departments. But is there some formula to his success? Read the full story.
—Sheon Han
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)
+ Why does everyone sing ‘caught in the middle’ like that? Music theory has an answer. + The mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder has completely reengineered the sound from the first 20 minutes of Mad Max: Fury Road and it’s great. + This 16-year old Australian sprinter might just be the next Usain Bolt. + Don’t expect Dune and Blade Runner 2049 director Denis Villeneuve to direct a Star Wars movie any time soon.
At first glance, the Mosphera scooter may look normal—just comically oversized. It’s like the monster truck of scooters, with a footplate seven inches off the ground that’s wide enough to stand on with your feet slightly apart—which you have to do to keep your balance, because when you flip the accelerator with a thumb, it takes off like a rocket. While the version I tried in a parking lot in Riga’s warehouse district had a limiter on the motor, the production version of the supersized electric scooter can hit 100 kilometers (62 miles) per hour on the flat. The all-terrain vehicle can also go 300 kilometers on a single charge and climb 45-degree inclines.
Latvian startup Global Wolf Motors launched in 2020 with a hope that the Mosphera would fill a niche in micromobility. Like commuters who use scooters in urban environments, farmers and vintners could use the Mosphera to zip around their properties; miners and utility workers could use it for maintenance and security patrols; police and border guards could drive them on forest paths. And, they thought, maybe the military might want a few to traverse its bases or even the battlefield—though they knew that was something of a long shot.
When co-founders Henrijs Bukavs and Klavs Asmanis first went to talk to Latvia’s armed forces, they were indeed met with skepticism—a military scooter, officials implied, didn’t make much sense—and a wall of bureaucracy. They found that no matter how good your pitch or how glossy your promo video (and Global Wolf’s promo is glossy: a slick montage of scooters jumping, climbing, and speeding in formation through woodlands and deserts), getting into military supply chains meant navigating layer upon layer of officialdom.
Then Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and everything changed. In the desperate early days of the war, Ukrainian combat units wanted any equipment they could get their hands on, and they were willing to try out ideas—like a military scooter—that might not have made the cut in peacetime. Asmanis knew a Latvian journalist heading to Ukraine; through the reporter’s contacts, the startup arranged to ship two Mospheras to the Ukrainian army.
Within weeks, the scooters were at the front line—and even behind it, being used by Ukrainian special forces scouts on daring reconnaissance missions. It was an unexpected but momentous step for Global Wolf, and an early indicator of a new demand that’s sweeping across tech companies along Ukraine’s borders: for civilian products that can be adapted quickly for military use.
Global Wolf’s high-definition marketing materials turned out to be nowhere near as effective as a few minutes of grainy phone footage from the war. The company has since shipped out nine more scooters to the Ukrainian army, which has asked for another 68. Where Latvian officials once scoffed, the country’s prime minister went to see Mosphera’s factory in April 2024, and now dignitaries and defense officials from the country are regular visitors.
It might have been hard a few years ago to imagine soldiers heading to battle on oversized toys made by a tech startup with no military heritage. But Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s attacks has been a miracle of social resilience and innovation—and the way the country has mobilized is serving both a warning and an inspiration to its neighbors. They’ve watched as startups, major industrial players, and political leaders in Ukraine have worked en masse to turn civilian technology into weapons and civil defense systems. They’ve seen Ukrainian entrepreneurs help bootstrap a military-industrial complex that is retrofitting civilian drones into artillery spotters and bombers, while software engineers become cyberwarriors and AI companies shift to battlefield intelligence. Engineers work directly with friends and family on the front line, iterating their products with incredible speed.
Their successes—often at a fraction of the cost of conventional weapons systems—have in turn awakened European governments and militaries to the potential of startup-style innovation and startups to the potential dual uses of their products, meaning ones that have legitimate civilian applications but can be modified at scale to turn them into weapons.
This heady mix of market demand and existential threat is pulling tech companies in Latvia and the other Baltic states into a significant pivot. Companies that can find military uses for their products are hardening them and discovering ways to get them in front of militaries that are increasingly willing to entertain the idea of working with startups. It’s a turn that may only become more urgent if the US under incoming President Donald Trump becomes less willing to underwrite the continent’s defense.
But while national governments, the European Union, and NATO are all throwing billions of dollars of public money into incubators and investment funds—followed closely by private-sector investors—some entrepreneurs and policy experts who have worked closely with Ukraine warn that Europe might have only partially learned the lessons from Ukraine’s resistance.
If Europe wants to be ready to meet the threat of attack, it needs to find new ways of working with the tech sector. That includes learning how Ukraine’s government and civil society adapted to turn civilian products into dual-use tools quickly and cut through bureaucracy to get innovative solutions to the front. Ukraine’s resilience shows that military technology isn’t just about what militaries buy but about how they buy it, and about how politics, civil society, and the tech sector can work together in a crisis.
“[Ukraine], unfortunately, is the best defense technology experimentation ground in the world right now. If you are not in Ukraine, then you are not in the defense business.”
“I think that a lot of tech companies in Europe would do what is needed to do. They would put their knowledge and skills where they’re needed,” says Ieva Ilves, a veteran Latvian diplomat and technology policy expert. But many governments across the continent are still too slow, too bureaucratic, and too worried that they might appear to be wasting money, meaning, she says, that they are not necessarily “preparing the soil for if [a] crisis comes.”
“The question is,” she says, “on a political level, are we capable of learning from Ukraine?”
Waking up the neighbors
Many Latvians and others across the Baltic nations feel the threat of Russian aggression more viscerally than their neighbors in Western Europe. Like Ukraine, Latvia has a long border with Russia and Belarus, a large Russian-speaking minority, and a history of occupation. Also like Ukraine, it has been the target of more than a decade of so-called “hybrid war” tactics—cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, and other attempts at destabilization—directed by Moscow.
Since Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine two-plus years ago, Latvia has stepped up its preparations for a physical confrontation, investing more than €300 million ($316 million) in fortifications along the Russian border and reinstating a limited form of conscription to boost its reserve forces. Since the start of this year, the Latvian fire service has been inspecting underground structures around the country, looking for cellars, parking garages, and metro stations that could be turned into bomb shelters.
And much like Ukraine,Latvia doesn’t have a huge military-industrial complex that can churn out artillery shells or tanks en masse.
What it and other smaller European countries can produce for themselves—and potentially sell to their allies—are small-scale weapons systems, software platforms, telecoms equipment, and specialized vehicles. The country is now making a significant investment in tools like Exonicus, a medical technology platform founded 11 years ago by Latvian sculptor Sandis Kondrats. Users of its augmented-reality battlefield-medicine training simulator put on a virtual reality headset that presents them with casualties, which they have to diagnose and figure out how to treat. The all-digital training saves money on mannequins, Kondrats says, and on critical field resources.
“If you use all the medical supplies on training, then you don’t have any medical supplies,” he says. Exonicus has recently broken into the military supply chain, striking deals with the Latvian, Estonian, US, and German militaries, and it has been training Ukrainian combat medics.
There’s also VR Cars, a company founded by two Latvian former rally drivers, that signed a contract in 2022 to develop off-road vehicles for the army’s special forces. And there is Entangle, a quantum encryption company that sells widgets that turn mobile phones into secure communications devices, and has recently received an innovation grant from the Latvian Ministry of Defense.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of the focus in Latvia has been on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, which have become ubiquitous on both sides fighting in Ukraine, often outperforming weapons systems that cost an order of magnitude more. In the early days of the war, Ukraine found itself largely relying on machines bought from abroad, such as the Turkish-made Bayraktar strike aircraft and jury-rigged DJI quadcopters from China. It took a while, but within a year the country was able to produce home-grown systems.
As a result, a lot of the emphasis in defense programs across Europe is on UAVs that can be built in-country. “The biggest thing when you talk to [European ministries of defense] now is that they say, ‘We want a big amount of drones, but we also want our own domestic production,’” says Ivan Tolchinsky, CEO of Atlas Dynamics, a drone company headquartered in Riga. Atlas Dynamics builds drones for industrial uses and has now made hardened versions of its surveillance UAVs that can resist electronic warfare and operate in battlefield conditions.
Agris Kipurs founded AirDog in 2014 to make drones that could track a subject autonomously; they were designed for people doing outdoor sports who wanted to film themselves without needing to fiddle with a controller. He and his co-founders sold the company to a US home security company, Alarm.com, in 2020. “For a while, we did not know exactly what we would build next,” Kipurs says. “But then, with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it became rather obvious.”
His new company, Origin Robotics, has recently “come out of stealth mode,” he says, after two years of research and development. Origin has built on the team’s experience in consumer drones and its expertise in autonomous flight to begin to build what Kipurs calls “an airborne precision-guided weapon system”—a guided bomb that a soldier can carry in a backpack.
The Latvian government has invested in encouraging startups like these, as well as small manufacturers, to develop military-capable UAVs by establishing a €600,000 prize fund for domestic drone startups and a €10 million budget to create a new drone program, working with local and international manufacturers.
Latvia is also the architect and co-leader, with the UK, of the Drone Coalition, a multicountry initiative that’s directing more than €500 million toward building a drone supply chain in the West. Under the initiative, militaries run competitions for drone makers, rewarding high performers with contracts and sending their products to Ukraine. Its grantees are often not allowed to publicize their contracts, for security reasons. “But the companies which are delivering products through that initiative are new to the market,” Kipurs says. “They are not the companies that were there five years ago.”
Even national telecommunications company LMT, which is partly government owned, is working on drones and other military-grade hardware, including sensor equipment and surveillance balloons. It’s developing a battlefield “internet of things” system—essentially, a system that can track in real time all the assets and personnel in a theater of war. “In Latvia, more or less, we are getting ready for war,” says former naval officer Kaspars Pollaks, who heads an LMT division that focuses on defense innovation. “We are just taking the threat really seriously. Because we will be operationally alone [if Russia invades].”
The Latvian government’s investments are being mirrored across Europe: NATO has expanded its Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) program, which runs startup incubators for dual-use technologies across the continent and the US, and launched a separate €1 billion startup fund in 2022. Adding to this, the European Investment Fund, a publicly owned investment company, launched a €175 million fund-of-funds this year to support defense technologies with dual-use potential. And the European Commission has earmarked more than €7 billion for defense research and development between now and 2027.
Private investors are also circling, looking for opportunities to profit from the boom. Figures from the European consultancy Dealroom show that fundraising by dual-use and military-tech companies on the continent was just shy of $1 billion in 2023—up nearly a third over 2022, despite an overall slowdown in venture capital activity.
When Atlas Dynamics started in 2015, funding was hard to come by, Tolchinsky says: “It’s always hard to make it as a hardware company, because VCs are more interested in software. And if you start talking about the defense market, people say, ‘Okay, it’s a long play for 10 or 20 years, it’s not interesting.’” That’s changed since 2022. “Now, what we see because of this war is more and more venture capital that wants to invest in defense companies,” Tolchinsky says.
But while money is helping startups get off the ground, to really prove the value of their products they need to get their tools in the hands of people who are going to use them. When I asked Kipurs if his products are currently being used in Ukraine, he only said: “I’m not allowed to answer that question directly. But our systems are with end users.”
Battle tested
Ukraine has moved on from the early days of the conflict, when it was willing to take almost anything that could be thrown at the invaders. But that experience has been critical in pushing the government to streamline its procurement processes dramatically to allow its soldiers to try out new defense-tech innovations.
Origin Robotics has built on a history of producing consumer drones to create a guided bomb that a soldier can carry in a backpack.
Technology that doesn’t work at the front puts soldiers at risk, so in many cases they have taken matters into their own hands. Two Ukrainian drone makers tell me that military procurement in the country has been effectively flipped on its head: If you want to sell your gear to the armed forces, you don’t go to the general staff—you go directly to the soldiers and put it in their hands. Once soldiers start asking their senior officers for your tool, you can go back to the bureaucrats and make a deal.
Many foreign companies have simply donated their products to Ukraine—partly out of a desire to help, and partly because they’ve identified a (potentially profitable) opportunity to expose them to the shortened innovation cycles of conflict and to get live feedback from those fighting. This can be surprisingly easy as some volunteer units handle their own parallel supply chains through crowdfunding and donations, and they are eager to try out new tools if someone is willing to give them freely. One logistics specialist supplying a front line unit, speaking anonymously as he’s not authorized to talk to the media, tells me that this spring, they turned to donated gear from startups in Europe and the US to fill gaps left by delayed US military aid, including untested prototypes of UAVs and communications equipment.
All of this has allowed many companies to bypass the traditionally slow process of testing and demonstrating their products, for better and worse.
Tech companies’ rush into the conflict zone has unnerved some observers, who are worried that by going to war, companies have sidestepped ethical and safety concerns over their tools. Clearview AI gave Ukraine access to its controversial facial recognition tools to help identify Russia’s war dead, for example, sparking moral and practical questions over accuracy, privacy, and human rights—publishing images of those killed in war is arguably a violation of the Geneva Convention. Some high-profile tech executives, including Palantir CEO Alex Karp and former Google CEO-turned-military-tech-investor Eric Schmidt, have used the conflict to try to shift the global norms for using artificial intelligence in war, building systems that let machines select targets for attacks—which some experts worry is a gateway into autonomous “killer robots.”
LMT’s Pollaks says he has visited Ukraine often since the war began. Though he declines to give more details, he euphemistically describes Ukraine’s wartime bureaucracy as “nonstandardized.” If you want to blow something up in front of an audience in the EU, he says, you have to go through a whole lot of approvals, and the paperwork can take months, even years. In Ukraine, plenty of people are willing to try out your tools.
“[Ukraine], unfortunately, is the best defense technology experimentation ground in the world right now,” Pollaks says. “If you are not in Ukraine, then you are not in the defense business.”
Jack Wang, principal at UK-based venture capital fund Project A, which invests in military-tech startups, agrees that the Ukraine “track” can be incredibly fruitful. “If you sell to Ukraine, you get faster product and tech iteration, and live field testing,” he says. “The dollars might vary. Sometimes zero, sometimes quite a bit. But you get your product in the field faster.”
The feedback that comes from the front is invaluable. Atlas Dynamics has opened an office in Ukraine, and its representatives there work with soldiers and special forces to refine and modify their products. When Russian forces started jamming a wide band of radio frequencies to disrupt communication with the drones, Atlas designed a smart frequency-hopping system, which scans for unjammed frequencies and switches control of the drone over to them, putting soldiers a step ahead of the enemy.
At Global Wolf, battlefield testing for the Mosphera has led to small but significant iterations of the product, which have come naturally as soldiers use it. One scooter-related problem on the front turned out to be resupplying soldiers in entrenched positions with ammunition. Just as urban scooters have become last-mile delivery solutions in cities, troops found that the Mosphera was well suited to shuttling small quantities of ammo at high speeds across rough ground or through forests. To make this job easier, Global Wolf tweaked the design of the vehicle’s optional extra trailer so that it perfectly fits eight NATO standard-sized bullet boxes.
Some snipers prefer the electric Mosphera to noisy motorbikes or quads, using the vehicles to weave between trees to get into position. But they also like to shoot from the saddle—something they couldn’t do from the scooter’s footplate. So Global Wolf designed a stable seat that lets shooters fire without having to dismount. Some units wanted infrared lights, and the company has made those, too. These types of requests give the team ideas for new upgrades: “It’s like buying a car,” Asmanis says. “You can have it with air conditioning, without air conditioning, with heated seats.”
Being battle-tested is already proving to be a powerful marketing tool. Bukavs told me he thinks defense ministers are getting closer to moving from promises toward “action.” The Latvian police have bought a handful of Mospheras, and the country’s military has acquired some, too, for special forces units. (“We don’t have any information on how they’re using them,” Asmanis says. “It’s better we don’t ask,” Bukavs interjects.) Military distributors from several other countries have also approached them to market their units locally.
Although they say their donations were motivated first and foremost by a desire to help Ukraine resist the Russian invasion, Bukavs and Asmanis admit that they have been paid back for their philanthropy many times over.
Of course, all this could change soon, and the Ukraine “track” could very well be disrupted when Trump returns to office in January. The US has provided more than $64 billion worth of military aid to Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion. A significant amount of that has been spent in Europe, in what Wang calls a kind of “drop-shipping”—Ukraine asks for drones, for instance, and the US buys them from a company in Europe, which ships them directly to the war effort.
Wang showed me a recent pitch deck from one European military-tech startup. In assessing the potential budgets available for its products, it compares the Ukrainian budget, which was in the tens of millions of dollars, and the “donated from everybody else” budget, which was a billion dollars. A large amount of that “everybody else” money comes from the US.
If, as many analysts expect, the Trump administration dramatically reduces or entirely stops US military aid to Ukraine, these young companies focused on military tech and dual-use tech will likely take a hit. “Ideally, the European side will step up their spending on European companies, but there will be a short-term gap,” Wang says.
A lasting change?
Russia’s full-scale invasion exposed how significantly the military-industrial complex in Europe has withered since the Cold War. Across the continent, governments have cut back investments in hardware like ships, tanks, and shells, partly because of a belief that wars would be fought on smaller scales, and partly to trim their national budgets.
“After decades of Europe reducing its combat capability,” Pollaks says, “now we are in the situation we are in. [It] will be a real challenge to ramp it up. And the way to do that, at least from our point of view, is real close integration between industry and the armed forces.”
This would hardly be controversial in the US, where the military and the defense industry often work closely together to develop new systems. But in Europe, this kind of collaboration would be “a bit wild,” Pollaks says. Militaries tend to be more closed off, working mainly with large defense contractors, and European investors have tended to be more squeamish about backing companies whose products could end up going to war.
As a result, despite the many positive signs for the developers of military tech, progress in overhauling the broader supply chain has been slower than many people in the sector would like.
Several founders of dual-use and military-tech companies in Latvia and the other Baltic states tell me they are often invited to events where they pitch to enthusiastic audiences of policymakers, but they never see any major orders afterward. “I don’t think any amount of VC blogging or podcasting will change how the military actually procures technology,” says Project A’s Wang. Despite what’s happening next door, Ukraine’s neighbors are still ultimately operating in peacetime. Government budgets remain tight, and even if the bureaucracy has become more flexible, layers upon layers of red tape remain.
Even Global Wolf’s Bukavs laments that a caravan of political figures has visited their factory but has not rewarded the company with big contracts. Despite Ukraine’s requests for the Mosphera scooters, for instance, they ultimately weren’t included in Latvia’s 2024 package of military aid due to budgetary constraints.
What this suggests is that European governments have learned a partial lesson from Ukraine—that startups can give you an edge in conflict. But experts worry that the continent’s politics means it may still struggle to innovate at speed. Many Western European countries have built up substantial bureaucracies to protect their democracies from corruption or external influences. Authoritarian states aren’t so hamstrung, and they, too, have been watching the war in Ukraine closely. Russian forces are reportedly testing Chinese and Iranian drones at the front line. Even North Korea has its own drone program.
The solution isn’t necessarily to throw out the mechanisms for accountability that are part of democratic society. But the systems that have been built up for good governance have led to fragility, sometimes leading governments to worry more about the politics of procurement than preparing for crises, according to Ilves and other policy experts I spoke to.
“Procurement problems grow bigger and bigger when democratic societies lose trust in leadership,” says Ilves, who now advises Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation on cybersecurity policy and international cooperation. “If a Twitter [troll] starts to go after a defense procurement budget, he can start to shape policy.”
That makes it hard to give financial support to a tech company whose products you don’t need now, for example, but whose capabilities might be useful to have in an emergency—a kind of merchant marine for technology, on constant reserve in case it’s needed. “We can’t push European tech to keep innovating imaginative crisis solutions,” Ilves says. “Business is business. It works for money, not for ideas.”
Even in Riga the war can feel remote, despite the Ukrainian flags flying from windows and above government buildings. Conversations about ordnance delivery and electronic warfare held in airy warehouse conversions can feel academic, even faintly absurd. In one incubator hub I visited in April, a company building a heavy-duty tracked ATV worked next door to an accounting software startup. On the top floor, bean bag chairs were laid out and a karaoke machine had been set up for a party that evening.
A sense of crisis is needed to jolt politicians, companies, and societies into understanding that the front line can come to them, Ilves says: “That’s my take on why I think the Baltics are ahead. Unfortunately not because we are so smart, but because we have this sense of necessity.”
Nevertheless, she says her experience over the past few years suggests there’s cause for hope if, or when, danger breaks through a country’s borders. Before the full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s government wasn’t exactly popular among the domestic business and tech communities. “And yet, they came together and put their brains and resources behind [the war effort],” she says. “I have a feeling that our societies are sometimes better than we think.”