Caroline Hyde

The contest is not explicitly saying they will be doing that, but they are saying that drones will be

moving around and taking commands from voice and turning those into digital instructions.

I think there are four stages.

First is, as you say, there are drones.

Everyone's become familiar with drones because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

And Elon Musk himself said in 2024 that if there is a major power war, it's going to be a drone war.

So everyone is very focused on what that might look like in the case of a U.S.-China contest over Taiwan.

People have flown multiple drones together.

That's not the same as a swarm.

A swarm really is where the drones talk to each other

They interact with each other and ultimately potentially carry a payload or a weapon and can drop that weapon on a target.

Weaving in AI to do that for automatic targeting recognition and in this case to take a command from someone giving a voice instruction and turn that into a movement or an action is relatively uncharted territory.

This is DC in the West Coast.

And of course, SpaceX, a long-term defense contractor, but never in offensive weapons, nothing ever so explicit.

And XAI, I mean, this is grok, this is X, what we're all going to post this story on afterwards.

They are now hiring for people with clearances.

And that's a real change.

They're looking for people with secret clearance and top secret clearance.

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