The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 17 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Michael: Inherited Pentagon AI contracts created dangerous vendor lock-in
“Well, they came up now because as I started to look at the contracts that had been written during the last administration for the use of AI. I had a whole, holy cow moment because there were things not well beyond what you've been hearing in the press in the l…”
Michael: AI vendor questioned software use in Maduro raid
“And then second, after the Maduro raid, one of the primary vendor for this had raised the question, senior exec about whether their software was used during the Maduro raid, which is one of the most successful op military, military operations of our lifetime. …”
Michael: DOD diversifying AI vendor base following software terms dispute
“So that set off a series of events of, whoa, are we single-threaded on a vendor who's concerned about how we're using their software after the most successful military raid and the terms of service do not comport with the future world? We've got to get other p…”
Michael: DOD AI adoption grew from 80k to 1.2M in 90 days
“In 90 days, I think we've had 1.2 million of the three million people at the department. Use some form of AI when that was, that number was 80,000 before I started.”
Michael: Commercial AI constitutions cannot dictate US military command and control
“It can't, the software, the soul, someone's soul of their model, their constitution, which is not the U S constitution. Can't be dictating our command and control environment and telling generals and war fighters what to do and not do.”
Michael: Four frontier AI companies rely on pool of 1,000 researchers
“You have four companies that you could call frontier companies, and then you have this sort of major league baseball roster of researchers, like a thousand who they're trading amongst themselves, who, if you ask the leaders of these companies are so incredibly…”
Michael: Google transitioned from avoiding defense work to top government partner
“Google didn't want to bid on the contract. Now Google is a great partner, you know, and so I'd hope some of the newer companies would learn from what Google did, which is, you know, they didn't want to serve the government because that employee mob issues, but…”
Michael: Defense Department is way behind in AI
“We're trending toward artificial general intelligence, a substrate, a layer, something that'll touch everything, but we're way behind in AI at the department.”
Michael: DOD moving at unprecedented pace under Trump and Hegseth
“Then President Trump got elected, and I was like, wow, this is a moment where, you know, you have a disruptor at the top, he chose Secretary Hegsass, and that meant all the problems I'd seen, you know, there'd be a clearer way to solve them, and you could see …”
Michael: DOD reduced tech priorities to six, making AI top priority
“We got them down to six and there were the places where I thought we had the greatest opportunity for change and for growth and impact on our combat power and for our industrial base. And that was a starting point. An applied AI was number one”
Michael: AI Trained on Satellite Imagery Boosts Analyst Throughput 1,000x
“Imagine decades of satellite imagery that you could use to train a model and get insights and then use that to do anomaly detections. You could find out what's happening. So you take a human analyst and you increase their throughput by a thousand.”
Michael: China's post-2010 military expansion is the largest in history
“So then we're faced with the biggest military buildup in history in China, starting In the mid two, 2000, like, 2010, and we didn't catch up.”
Michael: DOD has massive repositories of siloed, unused data
“We have a huge repositories of data at the department that's sitting there siloed unused.”
Michael: DOD has long held 40-page directive on autonomous weapons
“We've got 40 page internal directives that have been there for years about autonomous weaponry.”
Michael: Defense primes hold advantage in manufacturing, not innovation
“This is just the one thing the primes have an advantage on is not the inventiveness. It's the production and manufacturing ability to scale what they do with what they've initially built.”