Alpha-1 Development Activities

The Alpha-1 PE provides enterprise digital enablers and prototyping efforts to enable the Joint force to access, develop, and adopt artificial intelligence (AI) in warfighting, readiness, and business use cases more easily, securely, reliably, and responsibly. Alpha-1 funding supports AI activities associated with computer vision, generative AI (GenAI), autonomy, and Responsible AI (RAI) adoption. It also includes funding to recruit, train, educate, and enable the DoD workforce to advance AI adoption. Specific activities include enterprise data acquisition and labeling, AI development pipelines, testing and evaluation tools and processes, RAI capability development and enablement, AI and autonomy modeling and simulation, access to proven and emerging AI models, and associated compute infrastructure costs. Investments in these enterprise digital enablers allow DoD to invest centrally in common enablers to ensure interoperability and drive efficiencies, while multiple organizations and platforms can then leverage the capabilities locally in their use cases.

Drive coordinated enterprise-wide development of ATR models and autonomous systems with a focus on the data acquisition and labeling pipeline, synthetic data, model and simulation, and T&E services. CDAO will partner with NGA and DIU for the full AI/ML pipeline for ATR model development. CDAO will focus on data ingest, labeling, and model and sim capabilities or enterprise use. The FY 2026 request for Autonomy includes $109.024 thousand of discretionary and $16.000 thousand of mandatory (reconciliation) for a total of $125.024. The mandatory funds support Integrated Enablers for All-Domain, Attritable Autonomous Systems. Further information for this reconciliation request is provided in Chapter 6 of the Reconciliation Exhibit.

AI Theater Cloud (AITC) plans, designs, delivers, and supports enterprise-level infrastructure, cloud, and other data-centric capabilities that increase the delivery of data, the speed of decision-making, and enhance warfighting capabilities of US, Allies, and partner nation mission partners. The project’s technical solutions provide improved access to data and inference from artificial intelligence (AI) and other advanced analytics for Combatant Commands, Components, and Forward Deployed Elements including those in contested, degraded, or austere environments. There are three lines of effort in the project, Innovative Infrastructure Enhancements, Unclassified Collaboration Enclaves, and Classified Collaboration Enclaves. The Innovative Infrastructure LOE delivers robust and flexible infrastructure that supports effective and timely AI and data solution capabilities, removes long-haul latency and bandwidth limitations of existing communications infrastructure, and provides resilience for theater and edge users. The Unclassified Enclave LOE delivers cloud-based infrastructure access, user authentication, common collaboration tools, and shared database tools in unclassified enclaves that are secured with two factor authentication but do not require a US-only Common Access Card. An example solution from this LOE is the Sky-Blue enclave employed by the International Donor Coordination Center of the Security Assistance Group – Ukraine, operating in support of US EUCOM, NATO, and the EU. The Classified Collaboration LOE delivers similar capabilities but in enclaves authorized to process Secret Releasable data and information. An example of this LOE’s technical solutions is the AUKUS Common Development Environment, supporting the three nation agreement with an information environment that enables development of advanced analytics for acoustic data analysis.

Provide available commercial capabilities and lead pilots to accelerate adoption of Frontier AI capabilities on mission areas through rapid prototyping and rigorous experimentation. Partner with GenAI companies and CCMDs to apply models to address gaps and develop assessments to properly evaluate capability. The FY 2026 request for Frontier AI includes $320.815 thousand of discretionary and $124.749 thousand of mandatory (reconciliation) for a total of $445.564. Further information for this reconciliation request is provided in Chapter 6 of the Reconciliation Exhibit.