Tech giants team up to expand AI for national security; how a Chinese cyberattack could unfold like the CrowdStrike outage

Palantir and Microsoft on Thursday announced an expanded partnership giving national security leaders the ability to leverage a “first-of-its-kind, integrated suite of technology” to operationalize their missions. In Microsoft’s government and classified cloud environments, intelligence and defense officials will be able to utilize the company’s large language models through the Azure OpenAI Service within Palantir’s AI Platform. On top of that, Palantir’s Gotham and Apollo products — a data-driven enterprise mission-planning platform and an operational software deployment control center, respectively — will be installed in Microsoft Azure Government, as well as in the Azure Government Secret (Defense Department Impact Level 6) and Top Secret clouds.

Meanwhile, the annual Black Hat conference kicked off this week in Las Vegas, and CISA Director Jen Easterly spoke about how she views the recent CrowdStrike outage that caused millions of computers around the world to malfunction as “a useful exercise” for understanding what Chinese-linked cyber operations focused on sensitive U.S. networks could accomplish. If tensions were to escalate in the Pacific, the U.S. could see Beijing take action via the malicious campaign known as the Volt Typhoon to disrupt critical infrastructure similar to what the CrowdStrike outage caused, but at a more significant and perious scale. “A war in Asia will be accompanied by very serious threats to Americans — the explosion of pipelines, the pollution of water systems, the derailing of our transportation systems, the severing of our communications,” Easterly said.

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