From Prototype to Production: Unlocking Mission-Ready AI

Today, we are sharing the news of a new five-year, $100 million ceiling enterprise agreement between Scale AI and the DoD’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO). This partnership represents a significant step forward in providing our warfighters and mission operators with the cutting-edge AI tools they need to maintain a decisive advantage.

For the past two and a half years, we've worked closely with CDAO on a series of prototype agreements. This journey from rapid, experimental prototyping to a stable, enterprise-wide production agreement is a game-changer. For DoD mission partners, this provides the long-term stability and confidence to invest in and scale their AI strategies, knowing that a proven partner and a flexible contracting vehicle are in place to support them.

This agreement, known as an Other Transaction Authority (OTA), is designed specifically to help the DoD move at speed and partner with non-traditional tech companies like Scale. It streamlines the procurement process, allowing any component across the entire DoD to access our end-to-end AI platform.

What This Means for the DoD Mission

The true significance of this partnership is the access it provides to advanced AI capabilities on the networks where the most critical work happens. For too long, the gap between commercial AI innovation and the DoD’s classified environments has been a major barrier to adoption. This agreement bridges that gap.

• Turn Classified Data into a Strategic Asset: The DoD has vast amounts of unique, mission-critical data on its secure networks. Our Scale Data Engine provides the infrastructure to turn that raw, sensitive data into the high-quality, AI-ready fuel needed to build reliable and effective models. As Dr. Shuowen Hu, a lead research electronics engineer who supports Project Linchpin at DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory, said: “Data labeling is critical to the development of AI/ML models - rapid, high-quality labeling capabilities support DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory’s efforts in model training and evaluation for Army use cases such as aided target recognition.”
• Build Custom Generative AI with Sensitive Data: For the first time, this gives government builders access to the Scale GenAI Platform (SGP) in their own secure environments. This allows them to safely fine-tune, test, and deploy generative AI models using their own classified information—something that is impossible to do with public, commercial-off-the-shelf tools.
• Accelerate Decision-Making for Operators: With Scale Donovan, intelligence analysts and mission operators can now use a powerful generative AI platform to rapidly sift through and understand massive amounts of unstructured data. This accelerates the timeline from data to decision, providing actionable insights at mission speed.

This agreement is about empowering developers, analysts, and warfighters with the tools they need to solve the nation’s most critical national security challenges. We are honored to deepen our partnership with the Department of Defense and are fully committed to supporting their mission.