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Defense startup Covenant announced it has emerged from stealth mode with $250 million raised across three funding rounds, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Lux, 8VC, Aleph and Lightspeed. The company opened a 105,000-square-foot factory in Dallas to build its Anthem long-range cruise missiles, aiming to produce 1,000 units in the first year starting in early 2027 and scaling to 5,000 annually.
The NIH and Department of Defense have quietly confirmed a signed agreement, disclosed the Friday before a US holiday, that redirects part of the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases budget toward Pentagon research on pandemic flu, CBRN threats and emerging infectious diseases. The deal runs a decade, and while the exact dollar amount is unspecified, reports indicate the Pentagon sought roughly a third of relevant funding but was steered toward about 10 percent instead.
A Microbiology Spectrum study found that lit Bunsen burners did not lower airborne bacterial contamination compared with unlit ones, and in some trials contamination near lit burners was even higher. Researchers seeded lab air with Gordonia rubripertincta bacteria and compared Petri dishes placed near lit versus unlit burners across several burner sizes, consistently finding no protective benefit from the flame.
The Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps and Special Operations Command have all turned off advertising tracking on government-issued phones and computers, according to a letter Senator Ron Wyden shared. The change, rolled out earlier this year with the Air Force following in July, blocks the advertising identifiers apps use to generate location data that gets sold to data brokers.
Ukraine is releasing millions of data points from tens of thousands of drone missions to defense contractors and commercial companies, turning frontline combat into a unique training ground for AI systems. This data offers realistic, chaotic conditions that AI developers normally cannot replicate, making it highly valuable to the defense and tech industries. The move raises calls for new oversight since this wartime data differs fundamentally from typical commercial datasets.
The US Army's Joint Task Force Southern Border used a high-energy laser weapon to destroy three drones near the Rio Grande Valley overnight on August 25-26, after officials said the drones threatened military and Customs and Border Patrol personnel. The weapon involved is the Locust Laser Weapon System, built on AeroVironment's AMP-HEL technology and delivered to the Army starting September 2025, with additional units following in December.
Mykhailo Fedorov, recently removed as Ukraine's defense minister, is starting a defense technology company that will count Palantir CEO Alex Karp as its first lead investor. Details such as the company's name, funding amount, and specific technologies remain undisclosed, though Fedorov's office says more about the Palantir partnership will be revealed over time.
GoPro has agreed to be acquired by Starman Optical for $285 million, with shareholders receiving $1.14 per share and retaining roughly 10% of the combined company. The deal, expected to close by year-end, will eliminate GoPro's $92 million in debt and keep the company publicly traded. It follows earlier signals that GoPro was exploring a shift toward defense technology, and comes just after YouTuber Markiplier disclosed an 8.5% stake in the company.
Senate Democrats including Ed Markey and Ron Wyden say newly released documents show Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave false statements to the Senate during his 2025 confirmation hearings about his 2019 trip to Samoa, where he was a leading anti-vaccine activist before a measles outbreak killed 83 people, mostly young children. Wyden called the discrepancy a crime and urged the Department of Justice to open a criminal investigation, while Markey called it part of a broader pattern of dishonesty.
A federal judge in California ruled that the Trump administration illegally retaliated against Anthropic after the AI firm refused to lift restrictions on using its technology for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. Judge Rita Lin vacated orders that barred federal agencies from using Anthropic's products and blocked defense contractors from doing any business with the company, calling the government's national security justification baseless.
Nutanix executive Oscar Wahlberg argues that securing autonomous AI agents requires a defense-in-depth approach spanning infrastructure, storage, compute, networking and a governing control plane, rather than relying on prompt-level guardrails alone. He explains that infrastructure security must first establish a verified identity and root of trust for any system granted execution privileges, since traditional application controls fail to stop an agent from misusing credentials or taking unintended destructive actions.
A federal judge sided with Anthropic in its lawsuit against the Pentagon, finding that officials wrongly labeled the AI firm a supply chain risk after it criticized the Department of Defense's stance on military AI use. U.S. District Judge Rita Lin said the designation was punitive rather than based on legitimate security concerns, following a dispute that began in February when Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth accused Anthropic of threatening national security.