Austin commits to $1.5B for DOD’s Joint AI Center over next 5 years

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on Tuesday said he will commit $1.5 billion for the Department of Defense’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center over the next five years.

While Congress ultimately decides what funding the JAIC will get, in recent years, it has shown willingness to appropriate funding to develop it as DOD’s AI “enabling force.” The most recent budget requests have yielded around $200 million annually for the JAIC, a number that would increase to about $300 million per year if Austin’s promised $1.5 billion is authorized by Congress.

“Done responsibly, leadership in AI can boost our future military tech advantage — from data-driven decisions to human-machine teaming. And that could make the Pentagon of the near future dramatically more effective, more agile, and more ready,” Austin said at the National Security Commission on AI conference Tuesday.

Austin said that the department has more than 600 AI projects running, many more than the year prior. The JAIC has been at the center of the DOD’s AI push, at first working on individual projects but now focusing on assisting the DOD’s myriad of AI offices. One of the programs the center continues to focus on is the Joint Common Foundations, an AI development platform that it eventually hopes will be the central tool developers across the department will use to write code, work with data and advance AI projects of their own.

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