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SAN FRANCISCO — Alexandr Wang grew up in the shadow of Los Alamos National Laboratory — the birthplace of the atomic bomb. Now the 26-year-old CEO of artificial intelligence company ScaleAI wants to play a key role in the next great age of geopolitical conflict.
Scale, co-founded by Wang in 2016 to help other companies organize and label data to train AI algorithms, is aggressively pitching itself as the company that will help the U.S. military in its existential battle with China , offering to help the Pentagon extract better insights from the reams of information generated daily, build better autonomous vehicles, and even create chatbots that can advise military commanders in combat.
Last year, the company won a $249 million contract to supply a range of AI technologies to the Department of Defense. Scale also counts the Army, Air Force, Marine Corps University and military truck manufacturer Oshkosh among its individual customers.
In May, Scale became the first AI company to deploy a “large language model” – the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT – on a secret network after securing a contract with the XVIII. The Army Airborne Corps had signed. Scale’s chatbot, known as “Donovan,” is designed to synthesize information and help commanders make decisions more quickly.
For Wang, who describes himself as a “China hawk,” the stakes are high: Without AI developed by private technology companies, the United States will not be able to maintain its technological edge over the rising military power of China.
“Data is ultimately the ammunition of AI warfare,” he said in a recent interview, repeating a phrase he used at conferences and during a congressional hearing in July. And the United States is already behind in stockpiling this munitions, Wang said.
The U.S. military has made AI a key part of its strategy for the coming decades, with plans to use autonomous ships and aircraft to support human-operated machines, as well as using algorithms to improve logistics by predicting when certain parts will be replaced and for scans, drone footage is developed with image recognition technology to reduce the burden on human analysts.
Scale has benefited from staying ahead of the recent AI boom, sparked last year when OpenAI made ChatGPT available to the public. Scale has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and was valued by its investors at over $7 billion in 2021, making Wang the youngest self-made billionaire in the world at the time, according to Forbes.
But competition for military contracts is fierce. Big tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon are all aggressively trying to woo the Pentagon. In December 2022, those three firms, as well as enterprise software company Oracle, were given exclusive rights to bid for $9 billion in cloud computing contracts across the Defense Department, which could eat up some of what Scale wants to compete for. A growing group of other startups, including Shield AI and Helsing, are raising significant amounts of money and working to sell their technology to the military as well.
(Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, and the newspaper’s interim CEO, Patty Stonesifer, sits on Amazon’s board.)
Scale has suffered damage to its reputation because of its work in the global south, where it employs thousands of moderators in so-called “digital sweatshops.” In January, the company laid off 20 percent of its employees as part of a wave of layoffs in the tech industry. A Washington Post investigation found that dozens of Scale contractors in the Philippines were not paid on time or at all for the work they did. A Scale spokesman said at the time that delays and payment interruptions were “extremely rare.”
Arms control advocates have protested against the military’s use of AI because they fear it will gradually distract people from important decisions, including who or what to target on the battlefield. Some weapons have had autonomous capabilities for years, and drones that can automatically detect targets and dive-bomb them without final permission from humans are already in military arsenals around the world. The US military says a human will always be “in the loop,” but studies have shown that people are more likely to follow the advice of authoritarian-sounding machines than trust their own judgment.
Wang had no intention of becoming a military contractor. He founded Scale after leaving MIT at age 19 with Lucy Guo, an intern at the question-and-answer site Quora. Back then, breakthroughs in AI research led to algorithms that could recognize images and seamlessly translate language. But the reams of images and videos that AI labs pulled from the Internet to train their data had to be labeled to teach the algorithms what they were looking at. To solve this problem, Wang and Guo developed Scale by hiring contractors around the world to laboriously add captions to images and then charging for the service.
In 2018, two years after founding the company, Wang traveled to China for a learning tour of the country’s booming AI scene. As he entered the office of a facial recognition startup he was visiting, a giant screen played a video of the lobby, identifying the demographics of everyone entering and, in the case of Chinese citizens, displaying their names and biographical details next to their faces.
“It was supposed to be a demonstration of their technology, but it’s also just frightening,” Wang said of the apparent display of surveillance. The casual presentation of how commercial technology could be used for government purposes made it clear to Wang that the close relationship between China’s technology companies and its military gave the country an advantage that could allow it to overcome the United States’ decades-long dominance in high technology.
At the same time, the gap between corporate America and the government appeared to be widening. Wang’s trip came around the same time that Google announced it would not renew a contract to provide AI to help the military analyze drone footage after many of the company’s employees objected to the program, known as Project Maven.
“It felt like this noticeable break in tone would lead, if it continued, to China gaining military AI dominance over the United States,” Wang said.
Some technology executives and investors have long argued that navigating the military’s bureaucratic procurement process is too complicated and time-consuming for companies that also serve regular commercial customers. Many AI researchers are deeply skeptical of the U.S. government’s motives and fear that putting AI into the hands of powerful militaries could lead to increased surveillance and even the risk of AI escaping human control and causing harm in the real world causes.
“As with any arms race, arming each side is justified by arming the other side,” said Lucy Suchman, a retired professor at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom who studies how AI is used by militaries. “It’s a self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing cycle.”
Wang is aware of the risks involved in bringing advanced AI into play and said the new technology will always require rigorous testing before deployment.
A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment. Spokespeople for Google and Oracle did not respond to a request for comment.
Fears that China could invade Taiwan and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine have pushed the tech industry back toward the government, said Michael Brown, a partner at defense-focused venture capital firm Shield Capital and a former director of the Defense Innovation Unit Pentagon serves as the military’s embassy to the technology industry.
In 2022, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon spent a combined $198.9 billion on research and development, while the Pentagon spent $132 billion, including on testing and evaluating new weapons and tools.
“Defense is ripe for disruption from both Big Tech and newer entrants,” said Nathan Benaich, founder of Air Street Capital, a venture capital firm that has invested in a handful of military technology companies.
Scale is also pushing forward with providing its own tools.
Its military-focused ChatGPT competitor Donovan is already being tested by military units and Marine Corps University students. Scale pitches the bot as an “AI-powered decision-making platform” that can process intelligence data from various sources and provide recommendations to human officials.
A demo from Donovan shows the chatbot identifying a suspicious Chinese ship near Taiwan and then providing an official with options to find more information, such as sending a plane to fly over or getting current satellite images. Once the images are available, image recognition algorithms identify high levels of radiation, prompting the officer to pass the information up the chain of command and dispatch a drone to examine the ship.
But selling to the military is difficult even without intense competition, Benaich said.
“Defense is a customer like no other and requires deep institutional expertise to be successful. Selling to the army is not like selling to Uber,” he said.
Wang said Scale still has a wide range of customers and does not need military funding to be successful. He said the collaboration with the Pentagon stems from the company’s desire to help the United States maintain its power in the world even as the 21st century brings more conflict and complications to the global order.
“If Scale can be the company that helps ensure that the United States maintains this leadership position in this very abrupt and drastic technology transition, that is a very real and very tangible impact,” he said.