You’re telling me that you can’t find 10 worthwhile AI startups to give money to? I bet there are 1000 on crunchbase right now. With $10M some of them could buy hardware to build their own systems.
This is people's money, and people benefit from competition in the market
The govt already has various programmes to help promote small business contractors in US defence. This is not a programme; it's a definitive project that has a specific set of (admittedly vague) objectives in mind. It's more efficient for the taxpayer for these to be accomplished when the funding is consolidated to a few entities for a 50% success rate, than to 20 different entities for a 5% success rate.
Funding research is, by definition, less cut-and-dry as to what we should pay for; thus having an agenda is not always bad and might even be good. I am using an "agenda" not in a narrow political sense, but including positions like "we should be funding space comms / drone networks / real-time soldier health monitoring / whatever because industry is not building what we think we will need in a few years".
But being somewhat exposed to the waste of DoD procurement I am personally vehemently against inserting such ideology into procurement decisions. Those should be money-based. Get what you need at the least cost to the taxpayer. If you do not know what you need, think harder or invite experts or do a study (and publish it so people writing it know they are associated with those decisions) before paying billions for questionable junk. My 2c.
DoD is experimenting with LLMs and is using multiple of the top providers in the space… just like every other tech company is doing. Everyone I know is coding with Claude, Gemini, or GPT and my experiments with Grok 4 have easily been as good.
If this was an innovation fund, ala what Canada likes to waste money on - where the gov pretends it’s a really bad VC, I’d at least understand these critiques.
Even then, these companies aren't doing research into LLMs, they're just wrapping the endpoints and creating some abstractions.
This admin is about graft and shakedowns. Just like the implosion of science, the companies that exist due to smallish federal contracts for obscure tech and speculative investments are toast.