Palantir and Anduril have teamed up to 'ensure the US government leads the world in artificial intelligence' and this is what happens when LOTR fans get to name companies

I've never been that much of a Tolkien buff, but even I know a Lord of the Rings reference when I see one. Gundalf, Bilbao, and Legsolarse are much beloved characters for many of you (I'm told), so an exciting partnership between Palantir and Anduril should be right up your street.

Okay, perhaps not quite this pairing, but a team up between a top analytics outfit and an autonomous defence systems vendor has real-world implications that might be worth paying attention to regardless. Palantir Technologies specialises in software platforms for big data analytics, while Anduril is a US defence technology company with the stated mission of "transforming defence capabilities with advanced technology."

Together they've announced a new consortium to "ensure that the US government leads the world in artificial intelligence" (via The Register). Exactly what that means is hidden among an impressive array of corpo-speak, but there's some language here that instinctively makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

"We will utilize Anduril’s Lattice software system and the Anduril Menace family of deployable compute and communications systems to instrument the tactical edge for the government’s secure, large-scale data retention and distribution.

"Lattice connects directly with third-party defense systems at the edge, delivers autonomy to machine operations, securely distributes their information across a large-scale data mesh, and backhauls all tactical data into government enclaves for the purposes of AI training and inferencing.

Menace devices are also purpose-built for the tactical edge, customized down to the silicon level for the unique requirements of national security operations in tactical environments—including, soon, next-generation encryption."

With the best will in the world, calling one of your systems "Menace", as a defence company, doesn't strike as particularly great optics. Anyway, the gist of the partnership is that there are supposedly two limiting factors to adopting AI for national security purposes: Data readiness, and secure enterprise pipelines to "turn that data into AI capabilities."

To solve this, Anduril's systems will connect to third-party defence systems and gather data, before Palantir's AI platform structures and labels it for AI training, while also providing a secure pipeline to deploy AI models into national security systems. That's a lot of "systems", I know, but parsing and simplifying this sort of doublespeak seems like the kind of job that a machine learning model would actually be better at than me.

In the Tolkienverse, a palantír is an indestructible crystal ball used for communication and to see events in the past, the same kind that cheeky hobbit Poppin uses to gaze into the eye of Soorun (I'll stop it now) before Gandalf snatches it away from him and gives an appropriate scolding.

Andúril, meanwhile, is the name of Aragorn's gigantic sword, reforged from the shards of Narsil and also referred to as the "Flame of the West."

Which, given the context, seems somewhat appropriate. Or slightly terrifying, you pick. Anyway, this is what happens when grown nerds start naming companies after objects from their favourite universes, so I look forward to writing about future team-ups between Death Star Enterprises, Phaser Corp., and the Infinity Stone Institute. What a world, eh?

Oh, and if I've got any of the LOTR lore here wrong, feel free to write in to any of my editors at... actually, on second thoughts, don't. It probably wouldn't be appreciated.