Efficiency Maine Trust

Pentagon | April 06, 2020

The Defense Department urged a federal judge to grant its motion—filed in March— for a 120-day remand to reconsider the evaluation for its Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract. In a legal filing April 3, Justice Department attorneys representing the Pentagon said Amazon Web Services seeks a “do-over” of the JEDI contract Microsoft ultimately won in October. In late March, AWS—which is protesting the JEDI cloud contract award—asked Judge Patricia Ca...

White House | February 12, 2020

Plans to increase the AI and quantum computing budget shows that the Pentagon will no longer be a backseat driver in the development of cutting-edge military tech. Expect US capabilities to grow rapidly and in greater secrecy. The announcement last week that more money of the Trump administration’s proposed $4.8 trillion budget would be earmarked for the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation is a significant step in the ongoing Artificial Intelligence arms race. Fearful...

Apple | January 30, 2020

Less than three weeks after quietly acquiring artificial intelligence company Xnor.ai, Apple has swiftly canceled the company’s preexisting contract with the Pentagon that would have seen its tech used in the controversial “Project Maven” military drone operation. That’s according to a report from The Information, citing a person familiar with the matter. Project Maven is the Pentagon’s initiative to use artificial intelligence to identify objects and targets of int...

Pentagon | March 30, 2020

The Defense Department modified an existing government contract to purchase 8,000 ventilators from four vendors worth as much $84 million, with an initial shipment of 1,400 of the increasingly important ventilators due for delivery by early May. The announcement to purchase ventilators—already in need in COVID-19 hot spots like New York and Louisiana— for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to distribute was one of several major partnership efforts with the defense industrial bas...