Inside Anduril and Meta's Quest to Make Smart Glasses for Warfare
Anduril and Meta are co-developing an augmented-reality headset for military use, with new details revealing capabilities such as ordering drone strikes via eye-tracking and voice commands. The project is led by Quay Barnett, a former Army Special Operations Command officer now serving as VP at Anduril. The collaboration represents a significant convergence of consumer AR hardware expertise (Meta) with defense-tech integration (Anduril) for battlefield applications.
Related guides (3)
Related events (8)
Anthropic awarded $200M DOD agreement to prototype frontier AI for national security
The U.S. Department of Defense's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) has awarded Anthropic a two-year, $200M ceiling prototype other transaction agreement to develop frontier AI capabilities for national security applications. Work will include fine-tuning models on DOD data, adversarial AI risk mitigation, and responsible AI adoption across the defense enterprise. Anthropic will leverage its Claude Gov models and existing partnerships with Palantir and AWS-hosted infrastructure. This is a significant expansion of Anthropic's federal footprint, building on prior deployments with defense and intelligence agencies.
Anthropic Acquires Vercept to Advance Claude's Computer Use Capabilities
Anthropic has acquired Vercept, a team specializing in AI perception and interaction for computer use tasks, whose co-founders include Kiana Ehsani, Luca Weihs, and Ross Girshick. Vercept will wind down its external product and join Anthropic to push computer use capabilities further. The announcement coincides with the launch of Claude Sonnet 4.6, which achieved 72.5% on the OSWorld benchmark—up from under 15% in late 2024—approaching human-level performance on tasks like navigating spreadsheets and completing web forms. This follows Anthropic's earlier acquisition of Bun and is part of a broader strategy to build agentic, multi-step task capabilities into Claude.
Dario Amodei Statement: Anthropic Refuses DoD Demands to Remove Safeguards on Mass Surveillance and Autonomous Weapons
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has published a public statement disclosing that the U.S. Department of War (formerly Defense) has demanded Anthropic accede to 'any lawful use' of Claude and remove safeguards in two specific areas: mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Anthropic refuses, citing democratic values and current AI reliability limitations, despite threats of contract termination, a 'supply chain risk' designation, and potential invocation of the Defense Production Act. The statement confirms Claude is already extensively deployed across DoD and intelligence community systems for mission-critical applications including intelligence analysis, operational planning, and cyber operations. Anthropic states it will facilitate a smooth transition if offboarded, but will not remove the two contested safeguards.
OpenAI's Agreement with the Department of War
OpenAI has announced a formal contract with the U.S. Department of War (likely a rebranded or renamed defense entity) covering the deployment of AI systems in classified environments. The agreement outlines safety red lines, legal protections, and operational constraints for military use. This represents a significant expansion of OpenAI's government and defense partnerships, with explicit safety guardrails negotiated as part of the deal.
Data Points: Anthropic's Claude Mythos Cybersecurity Claims Face Scrutiny; OpenAI-Cerebras Deal; Meta AI CEO Avatar; Infrastructure Delays
A multi-item digest covers skepticism around Anthropic's Claude Mythos zero-day vulnerability claims (flagged as overstated by Tom's Hardware based on limited 198-case evidence), OpenAI's $20B+ deal with Cerebras for AI processors including a potential ~10% equity stake, and satellite data showing ~40% of U.S. AI data center projects are behind schedule. Additional items cover Meta developing an AI avatar of CEO Zuckerberg for internal use, Moody's flagging credit stress in AI-disrupted sectors, and Luma AI launching an AI-driven film production studio using its Uni-1 model.
Behind "ANCESTRA": combining Veo with live-action filmmaking
Google DeepMind partnered with filmmaker Darren Aronofsky and director Eliza McNitt, along with a crew of over 200 people, to produce a film called ANCESTRA that integrates Veo video generation with live-action filmmaking. The project represents a high-profile creative application of DeepMind's Veo video model in professional cinematic production. This serves as a capability demonstration of Veo in a real-world, large-scale filmmaking context.
Anthropic Releases Claude Mythos Preview with Extraordinary Cybersecurity Capabilities, Forms Project Glasswing Consortium
Anthropic has published a 244-page model card for Claude Mythos Preview, a large language model not yet commercially available, which broadly outperforms Claude Opus 4.6 and is described as 'strikingly capable' at identifying and exploiting code vulnerabilities. To mitigate risks before potential release, Anthropic assembled Project Glasswing, a consortium including AWS, Apple, Google, Microsoft, CrowdStrike, Nvidia, and 40+ other organizations, funded with $100 million in API credits and $4 million in open-source security donations. This marks the first time Anthropic has published a model card without making the model commercially available, signaling an unusual safety-first deployment posture. The issue also includes commentary from Andrew Ng on AI's impact on software engineering jobs, arguing against an 'AI jobpocalypse' narrative.
UPenn PRONTO Team Uses Meta's SAM 2 and DINO for Autonomous Military Medical Triage in DARPA Challenge
The University of Pennsylvania's PRONTO team is applying Meta's Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) and DINO/Grounding DINO models to autonomous robotic triage in DARPA's three-year mass casualty incident challenge. The multi-robot system uses drones and ground robots to locate victims, then runs parallel injury classification pipelines combining SAM, DINO, and pose estimation to assess heart rate, respiration, wounds, and amputations without requiring labeled training data. Results are surfaced to first responders via a mobile interface for real-time prioritization. Phase 2 concluded in October 2025, with Phase 3 expected to push toward deployment-ready performance.