We saw a demo of the new AI system powering Anduril's vision for war

I was here to examine the pitch being made by Anduril, other companies in defense tech, and growing numbers of people within the Pentagon itself: A future "great power" conflict--military jargon for a global war involving competition between multiple countries--will not be won by the entity with the most advanced drones or firepower, or even the cheapest firepower. It will be won by whoever can sort through and share information the fastest. And that will have to be done "at the edge" where threats arise, not necessarily at a command post in Washington. "You're going to need to really empower lower levels to make decisions, to understand what's going on, and to fight," Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf says. "That is a different paradigm than today." To show how the new tech will fix that, Anduril walked me through an exercise demonstrating how its system would take down an incoming drone threatening a base of the US military or its allies (the scenario at the center of Anduril's new partnership with OpenAI).