Elon Musk’s SpaceX and its subsidiary xAI are joining a secretive US Department of Defense competition centered on a voice command and control tool that could deploy multiple autonomous systems.

The project, launched in January with a $100-million budget and a six-month timeline, requires software that could coordinate unmanned swarming operations across the air and at sea,according toBloomberg.

The Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit and its new Defense Autonomous Warfare Group under the US Special Operations Command are overseeing the competition.

The contest will unfold in phases, starting with software development before advancing to live trials.

Musk’s Companies in Defense

SpaceX and xAI’s participation marks an expansion of Musk’s defense work into artificial intelligence-enabled weapons software, as the Pentagon moves to accelerate drone development and domestic manufacturing while cutting bureaucracy.

It also follows Washington’s call forcost-effective counter-drone solutions, particularly to protectcritical military and civilian infrastructure as well as large public events.

Separately, xAI, alongside other firms such asChatGPT owner OpenAI, secured defense contracts worth up to $200 million each last year to expand advanced artificial intelligence use across military systems.

The widescale adoptionsupports the current administration’s goal to employ such capabilities from live decision-making to complex field applications.

Contrasting Viewpoint

Amid the recent development, sourcescited Musk’s rally on the use of “offensive autonomous weapons” and the creation of “new tools for killing people,” warning about the utility of such drones and artificial intelligence in an open letter published in 2015.

The 12-page document leaned on the “potential pitfalls” of creating platforms and their economic impact and ethical concerns.

Thepaper was written in collaboration with other tech giants and researchers, including signatories from Cornell University and MIT.