Trac Bannon: "Let's start by saying fast money with slow governance is a formula for really expensive failure. I would rather spend three billion well than 152 odd billion poorly."
Carolyn Ford: "Two months ago on our last 'So What' episode, Bannon told me, 'Watch the acquisition behavior, not the org chart.' You also have to consider that it is going to make a big difference with contracting and acquisition. We watched and a lot happened. Trac is an enterprise software architect and technologist who lives at the messy intersection of policy, people, and implementation, which means she's one of the few people who can actually tell us what's happening in the DOD versus what the press releases say. We're getting into the 152 billion with a 'B' the DOD wants to burn in a single year. Anthropic's Mythos model, the cybersecurity AI that even Anthropic says is too scary to let people have. And what happens to mission-critical systems when you start dismantling the diversity of the teams building them? On that last one, I'll just say Trac's take doesn't fit neatly on either side of the DEI debate. She wants equality to result in diversity. That's a different starting point than most people are arguing from right now. But first, the 60-day reality check. Is Hegseth's AI and tech consolidation under CTO Emil Michael showing traction or just boxes being shuffled around?"
Carolyn Ford: "Trac, when we recorded in February, you said you'd be watching for early signals on whether or not the Pentagon's AI consolidation efforts were real change or if it was just org chart shuffle. So, we're two months in. Mm-hmm. Um, what are you seeing on the ground? Is Emil Michael CTO consolidation showing any traction?"
Trac Bannon: "It is showing traction. Um, the thing we always have to start with is that org chart changes are easy, right? Move this box here, arrange this, make this a nice bright color, make this one a dastardly color. The hard part are the people around it that write contracts that have scopes of work. Um, and they're starting to behave differently, and that's the part I'm watching. Um, acquisition decisions are being made differently.That's good. Um, and that's what those are the kind of things that I'm looking at is what kind of change can happen. There's a lot of energy, a lot of energy around this right now, especially CDAO. Um, you've heard this is the Chief Data Analytics Office. They are really, they've got a lot of energy behind them. The CIO that I work a lot with. No bureaucratic organization is immune to having pushback. Um, so right now it isn't authority, it's trust."
Carolyn Ford: "Yeah."
Trac Bannon: "You know what I mean?Because that's, I can say that you have the authority to do this and people will be like, 'Yeah, so what? I'm going that way.' I have nothing to say about Carolyn.They're going through the trust-building right now."
Carolyn Ford: "Um, it's impressive though that you're feeling something already."
Trac Bannon: "Let's, it's like a soccer game. I talked about this with another team today.I'm like, we're moving so fast that we have to start to trust one another on the field.We have to start to call the plays with each other. Trust that this person in this role knows what they're doing.Directionally, my observations right now is that it's going in the right direction."
Carolyn Ford: "Okay. Could that change tomorrow?"
Trac Bannon: "Well, yes."
Carolyn Ford: "Especially the world that we live in right now, Trac. Um, all right. Well, we talked about last time, we talked about Gemini had just rolled out to DOD desktops. You had three other providers.You had Groq, OpenAI, and Anthropic.They were in the queue. All right. So, where we are today? Um, are people actually using the tools or are they just there? Um, and I think this is part of the trust thing in the tools and each other. But so given everything that's happened with Anthropic as well, um, is there a bigger conversation now about which vendors you can actually trust?"
Trac Bannon: "Well, every desktop, every laptop, every device that we call them GFE, government furnished equipment, every one of them now has a link to go to genai.mil. As soon as it takes you there, you have the option of using Gemini right away. So, it's everywhere you go, it's right there. Is, are people using it? I will say yes.Yes. To the point where it's driving me batty a little bit. Um, but I appreciate it. I would rather have them using it a lot than not at all. Uh, let's see. You'll appreciate this story. If I'm coming in as your expert and I'm telling you what my lived experience is for these decades researching in these areas, these are the other experts who have weighed in on this. If that 'gubby' takes all of this information and goes, 'That's neat. Let's see what Gemini has to say.' There's a point where you're going, 'Excuse me.'"
Carolyn Ford: "Yeah, I know."
Trac Bannon: "So, there's a bit of that. Um, I really appreciate the government starting to leverage this to help them review the work that other people have done. So, if I write something and say, 'Hey, government peer, can you review this?'Knowing that they're reading through it, but also then applying an AI review to it actually makes it a little more full-bodied.So, I'm seeing some goodness there. I am seeing massive, massive papers. I don't even know what to call them. Something that might have been eight or 10 pages before, it's now 75 or 80 pages because Gemini was really, really chatty and put in a whole lot of details and then details upon details. Those are the times where you can tell that the employee, that human, was really tickled by the amount of stuff that's being dumped onto their desk, but they're not necessarily weeding through it all. Now, I'm not telling you that bad stuff is going out. I'm telling you that there's a bit of information overload because it's right there available to them.Right available to them. Um, the Anthropic question is an interesting one because it's still being used. It hasn't immediately been dozed from everybody's usage, right?There's up to six months available to wind that down. But I don't know if people have really considered. Did anybody know what language models Palantir uses under the covers? I'll just throw that out."
Carolyn Ford: "I won't say mine, but I guess that it's Anthropic."
Trac Bannon: "Well, you might guess that.I'm not going to confirm or deny that, but I will say that people need to think about that. Yeah, it is. It is very effective in some of the places that it's being used. So there are teams that are continuing with it in part because it is already pre-approved in gov clouds. Remember, if I'm going to go and use the cloud for, I will use AWS GovCloud or Azure Gov. Those clouds have a limited set of capabilities that have been really stress-tested security info-sec applied to them and they are approved.It's a smaller set. If I go out to AWS commercial versus what I can get in one of the AWS IL instances, it's a smaller set of things. Anthropic is a model that's approved there. Sonnet, Anthropic Sonnet is there, so people are still using it because it's available to them. Um, we'll have to see what happens. But it is the trust question. People are trusting it sometimes too much. No different in the Department of War than in any other domain space. I work with a group out of Salem State University. We have a think tank and it's dealing with social work and it's dealing with graduate students in social work. Same questions. Are they trusting too much? Where do you draw the line? How much of the thinking do you think versus having it given to you?Doesn't matter what domain it's in. That trust is a real thing right now. Yeah. Things are not going as quickly as we wanted with genai.mil in terms of them onboarding all the new capabilities, but they have the language model available and they also have the ability to create basic AI agents using Gemini. Gemini has an agent builder. So, it's very limited because I don't have a lot of integrations.So, what's cool about using AI agents is that I connect it to my email or connect it to Jira or connect it to some other kind of tool or repository. Right now, it's really limited in that. So, it's more or less a mega prompt on steroids for the minute. For the minute, but that'll be improved shortly, too."
Carolyn Ford: "But last time you said you will not connect it to your email."
Trac Bannon: "Well, I won't. That is very, very correct. Especially not my personal email.But if it's a government instance and I'm using government email and it's a closed loop, I'd be much more likely. But on my workstation, on my home machines, no."
Carolyn Ford: "Right. Right. No. Um, the last time we talked, Anthropic had not yet dropped all of the cool extra tools that they have now. Like there is an add-in to your Chrome browser wherever you are.And this is not opening up a new browser tab and typing into a regular chat interface. It's, I'm logged into Quicken. I'm doing my finances. I can open up Claude and it sees everything and it can control it for me."
Carolyn Ford: "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So now we're outsourcing our thinking to a whole another level. So you just turn it loose on your finances and Quicken and what do you mean it controls it for you?"
Trac Bannon: "I can tell it, 'Hey, I need you to do these things for me,' and you will literally watch it click open, navigate, and you'll watch it. It's chatting with itself as it goes. 'Next I need to go here and check these three things. Oh, I can see that this is configured incorrectly. Hey, you need to better link your credit card. This is not getting updated properly. I'll make that change for you. Would you like me to make that change for you? Sure, go ahead and make that change.' Click, click, click, click, click, click, click. It is absolutely breathtakingly amazing to watch."
Carolyn Ford: "So, it's connecting to your personal credit cards, too. Like, there's no way I'm doing that right now."
Trac Bannon: "It's whatever you want it to be. Where would you log in normally? Let's say you logged into LinkedIn and you said, 'You know what, Trac? You're my intern. You should go through this and pull out all my posts for the last year.' No, I'm too expensive as an intern. You turn to your intern, Claude. You say, 'Claude, go through all my posts for the last year, pull them out, and make them into actual blogs, true blog-length entries.' If I'm already logged into LinkedIn when I say that, it knows and it navigates those tools, but I've already logged in and because I've already logged in."
Carolyn Ford: "Yeah. So, this extension, no matter where you are, you just say this is what I'm trying to do and it can pick up in Quicken or LinkedIn or whatever."
Trac Bannon: "Correct."
Carolyn Ford: "Trac, Trac, Trac, Trac. Okay, let's, so it's growing. It's accelerating. Um, I told my older brother, who's one of my best friends, I said, 'I think I'm just gonna quit and play all day. Can I help you with your business? You want me to automate things for you?' He builds buildings. So, I think that's safe. That's safe for me. Like, I'm okay. I'm okay to connect all these things together. You want your marketing connected together, I'll connect your marketing. So, yeah. All right. Well, let's shift gears and talk about some other things that have happened since we last talked. I want to talk about the 152 billion proposed spend in one year rather than spreading it out over multiple years like Congress suggested. So, I read an article in Fed News Network that talks about this.So, it's supposed to be spent over 5 years and now the administration wants to accelerate and spend it all this year. Um, what do you think about that pace? Like what's it going to do? How's it going to impact the mission? Does it lead to expensive chaos? That's my vote. Where do you think the money should actually go? And there's a breakdown of like where the money is kind of going. I mean, it's these amounts of money though. I can't even wrap my head around them. I can't wrap my head around a million dollars, let alone 152 billion."
Trac Bannon: "So, let's start by saying fast money with slow governance is a formula for really expensive failure."
Carolyn Ford: "Chaos."
Trac Bannon: "I would rather spend three billion well than 152 odd billion poorly. Um, I don't think the math works quite yet. Um, we're trying to spend five years of our budget.You don't necessarily have the workforce to scale. It may scale more chaos. Uh, there could be more contractor uh what do you call it?"
Carolyn Ford: "Fraud."
Trac Bannon: "Opportunism. I didn't say fraud. Just being people being more opportunistic. What did we learn during 9/11? What we learned during COVID.What we learned fast, fast money attracts fast vendors. So, um, is there a legitimate argument for the speed? I think so. And that's the difficult part here because I don't understand why they want to spend it all in one year. What I understand of it without diving into all of the pie because I don't truly understand all the parts of it.One of the biggest justifications is AI is moving that fast and we need to acquire it faster than old school acquisition cycles.So if I wait three years to deploy that AI system, it's already obsolete. It's obsolete in a year."
Carolyn Ford: "Yeah. Okay. Yes. Sorry. My latest TV binge series is 'Daredevil: Reborn.' And all I can think right now is Kingpin is in charge."
Trac Bannon: "Okay. Okay. There's that. Um, so there are some unsexy investment pieces that have to be made and I don't know if it's getting enough sunshine on it.Architectural review still has to happen.You've got to have infrastructure has to be a part of this. Um, upskilling the workforce. That's a thing that's real. A governance layer. And I don't mean hardcore scabs over scabs over scabs, but there has to be enough governance on this. The AI ethics oversight piece is lagging at best. So, I'm worried that you've got program managers who have never managed this kind of an AI system making 20 million dollar decisions about these models and things that they don't understand and yet we have to move quickly. So, I don't know the right answer. I truly don't because all of it is moving so quickly. Perhaps it is accepting calculated failure. We know that this much of it is going to fail, but that's worth it. If let's say 50 billion is failure, and I don't want to even think that we could have 50 billion, but a hundred billion is valuable success, right? How do you, I think it's exceptionally difficult. Exceptionally difficult. And I do think that chaos and opportunism is going to weigh into it."
Carolyn Ford: "Yeah. Yeah. No, Kingpin's in charge. So, um, let's go back to Anthropic for a minute, okay? Between the last time we talked and now, Mythos, let's talk about Mythos. Can you make me smart about Mythos? Scary Mythos."
Trac Bannon: "So, what's important to know is really what's been out in the industry, what you've already heard about it. It was trained differently. It is so capable at identifying security flaws that no other models, no other algorithms have been able to detect. Anthropic said, 'Pause, pause. We were going to give this to the world, but it's too good for the world or it's too scary. It's too scary for the world.' Yeah. So, we're going to limit it to a very small group, right? Is it Gold Wing? Glass Wing. Glass Wing is who's limited to having access to it. Now, if you're a conspiracy theorist, you're looking at that saying, 'Wait, that's Nvidia.'So, Nvidia, uh, it is OpenAI, it's Microsoft, it's Apple. Yeah. And JP Morgan, which I found very, very interesting. Um, it cannot be released in the wild. It can't. Um, it needs to be used for good. I have my concerns. Will it only be used for good?There's a bit of a governance vacuum around this because think about this: the most powerful AI in the world right now when it comes to cybersecurity. One private company is determining who gets to be part of touching it, gets to be part of any kind of cybersecurity offense organization. Doesn't that need to have SISA? Shouldn't SISA, when they came up with that, I thought where's your government agency? There is NSA, there is NIST. Is somebody with a government hat on there? I don't know behind the scenes who's involved, and I want to believe in my heart of hearts that somebody from the government behind the scenes is involved. I mean it's rumored that government's certainly been briefed.So they're involved at least at that level we think."
Carolyn Ford: "Right. A briefing. Okay. All right. You know what? What did I even said that?"
Trac Bannon: "Yeah. What do they say? 'Release the Kraken.' Like, yes, I'm telling you, and I'm gonna give you a briefing.Okay, Trac. Kingpin's in charge. Kingpin is in charge. Um, so there's a governance vacuum. I think that that's really real. That is my biggest concern. The technology will continue to amaze me. Now, I can tell you that I didn't see it. I didn't physically touch it. So, I'm working on reports upon reports.I want to have more data to prove that it truly is what it says it is because there could be a little bit of posturing around this. But think about two things that have happened in rapid succession following the Hegseth announcement that Anthropic was now a supply chain risk.Supply chain risk, right? But also encouraging banks to use it in the same breath. Super weird. So it's a supply chain risk and then within couple of weeks somehow Claude Code was oops released to the wild. Released out. You've probably, I don't know if you followed this. Claude Code was somebody accidentally pushed the repo."
Carolyn Ford: "No, I missed this."
Trac Bannon: "Yes. Gosh, Google this. Um, oh my gosh. Claude Code, right? One of their flagship capabilities. The core code of that was leaked within minutes. People had created versions of it, copied it down, converted it to other languages. So now we've got all of these fringe companies that have the code that..."
Carolyn Ford: "Mythos is in there, right?"
Trac Bannon: "Well, no, it's not. So Claude Code is a layer on top of it. It's all the agents on top of it. Um, Mythos is the model. There's a platform involved with it, but it's the model. Where I was going with that is they're supply chain risk. No, they're not. We all say, all of the big companies say it's not a supply chain risk and then oops, they leaked all of their super secret code onto the internet."
Carolyn Ford: "Yeah. Well, that's just odd.And then Mythos was announced a couple weeks after that. So there's just an oddity to it,: it's a supply chain risk, no it's not a supply chain risk. Yes it is if they dumped their code online. No it's not because they have the most powerful cybersecurity model in the universe."
Carolyn Ford: "Right. Right. You know, the whole thing, you pronounce it Mythos."
Trac Bannon: "I don't know how to say it."
Carolyn Ford: "I know it sounds more like a superhero villain. Mythos. Um..."
Trac Bannon: "I like Mythos. I think it works."
Carolyn Ford: "Okay. Well, it's a little bit reminiscent of what Altman did back in the day when he was first pitching OpenAI saying, 'Oh, it's too scary. It's too dangerous. We can't share it with the world.' To your point of the posturing, it kind of reminds me of that."
Trac Bannon: Scott Bessant, when he found out about Project Glass Wing and about Mythos, pulled together all the other major banks to have a conversation because think about this: JP Morgan is a part of that secret society of the Glass Wing. So there are a lot and there seem to be some pretty big concern.Now, I hope that JP Morgan is a part of this because they operate in a highly regulated industry that needs that kind of cybersecurity. I hope it's not because they are an investor."
Carolyn Ford: "Well, one of the stories that I read, it said that the Trump administration encouraged banks to use Mythos for self-auditing and security. So, the banks have it."
Trac Bannon: "Not unless they are making it actively available to people."
Carolyn Ford: "Okay. All right. Well, as if we haven't gotten spicy enough, my last question is, I think maybe the spiciest because it's about DEI. It's DEI. So now DEI initiatives are being targeted by executive order. I mean, they've been targeted for a while, but on March 26th, Trump signed the Executive Order 14398 addressing DEI discrimination by federal contractors. So, this is targeting, well, our defense contractors and every major tech firm basically has to make a choice right now. There's some deadlines in place and you and I know the research. Diverse security teams identify threats. Well, they identify threats 23% faster. The diverse teams make better decisions."
Carolyn Ford: So I was, I was googling right before the episode just to get the facts on this because we know diverse teams are stronger essentially and these are the stats that I pulled. 23% faster identity threats identified, or sorry, threats identified. They make better decisions 80% of the time. And I know you can find stats to dispute, but there's lots of research on this to show..."
Trac Bannon: "Peel it back. Peel this back because you already know my position on this. Um, I actually believe that we have to heavily invest in thought diversity. And that's where I always bubble it back to thought diversity. And whatever that means underneath it is fine. Yes. Um, it needs to as much as it's becoming a political conversation, keep it at the engineering level. I need to have robust systems that need to have a lot of different types of humans in the loop.Humans in the loop for this data test with different perspectives. Right. Right.Looking at it all the way around. And I need those to be the best of the best.Mm-hmm. So, I need what the intention is.My office mate, he has a ramp to get up onto his space. I see him. So, we need to have the best of the best and be avoiding anything that could be akin to a quota. So, I believe in diversity. I believe in having diversity. The hard part is when you start running against the research like you said.I do want there to be more robust teams, less brittle software. None of it has to do with ideology. It has to do with having a really diverse set of humans at the table.How do you get those diverse humans to the table that are at the caliber that you want? I don't know the answer. I know that where we swung for a long time was to give a helping hand, to open doors. Is that the right thing to do? I don't think that the intent is to say women can't be in the workplace anymore. That if you have a gender ideology difference that you shouldn't be hired, I don't think that that is the intent. I think it comes off that way on a personal level. I think it comes off that way."
Carolyn Ford: "It feels like that. It feels like the pendulum has swung way too far to the other side."
Trac Bannon: "I wanted to just land in the middle, which is what are your qualifications to get this stuff done, right?Um, and in the federal space, the population, the composition of the workforce usually lags anywhere from a year to two years behind industry. So, I think it's going to take a while until we see that impact. It could be that we don't start to see an impact in hiring practices. I just don't know. Um, right. This is a hard conversation because I want the most qualified individuals at the table and I'm hoping that we've broken enough barriers over the last 60 years that the most qualified people can come to the table.That's the question. I think an inflection point question is: have we broken enough barriers down that we can remove some of the helping hand? And I don't know the answer. I don't know the data to be able to say that. I do know to your point diversity, diverse thoughts at the table which comes from diverse backgrounds, diverse geographies, diverse lived experiences.That's an important piece. Where does your head land though with this?"
Carolyn Ford: "Like I said, it feels like the pendulum has swung way too far to the other side. I like what you just said though.I hadn't thought about this that maybe we have over the last 30 years pushed on that barrier enough that we truly can get the most qualified and diverse thought leaders at the table."
Trac Bannon: "Yeah, that's my hope."
Carolyn Ford: "Mine too. Really super big time."
Trac Bannon: "I would like to believe, I choose to believe that I'm at the table because I deserve to be at the table. I choose to believe that and not because somebody selected me to be in a spot to even out the numbers."
Carolyn Ford: "That's right. But so I choose to believe that. And there are other times where people have been throughout history have been actively excluded."
Carolyn Ford: "Well, and that's I guess I'm seeing that even with in the military, women are being forced to retire. They're being fired at the highest military levels because they're not qualified for their jobs. Um, transgender, they're being dismissed. So I'm just thinking about the military right now. So to me that is discrimination."
Trac Bannon: "Um, let me ask you something really dicey. This is really dicey."
Carolyn Ford: "I know. I know. This is intentionally gonna be oh, crunchy."
Trac Bannon: "Yeah, you go. When you take a step back and think about our Department of Defense has been renamed to Department of War, and you think about who your gladiators are? Um, are your gladiators your strongest, your fittest, your most aggressive? Sometimes the diversification may not help that goal.Is a woman the right person on the battlefield to be dragging the 200 pound guy off the field when 50 pounds?"
Carolyn Ford: "I'm thinking about the thinkers that can outthink."
Trac Bannon: "Mm-hmm. So you might not need to be able to drag."
Carolyn Ford: "Sure, you got to have your foot soldiers. You have to have that. And you can outthink."
Trac Bannon: "I do not disagree at all. Which is another way of saying I agree. Yeah. Um and where do we draw the line? So you're a thinker and you're a doer. Okay. You go over here in the thinker line. Okay. No, you go over here in the lift the heavy thing line.I don't know. I wanted to put that out there because those are musings that I hear. I hear those, I hear both sides of the conversations. And my opinion changes by the minute based on the situation that I'm in at that moment, the context of trying to answer that because no, I don't think there's one answer for it. I really don't.Okay. But it is springtime. It is sunny here.I'm seeing all the spring flowers and the daffodils. And there is a giant 80-pound dog."
Carolyn Ford: "I know. Look at him. He's so sweet. The puppy eyes. Remind me his name one more time."
Trac Bannon: "His name is Doc, which is short for Dr. Bannon because he eats my research books. He consumes knowledge.So, he's Dr. Bannon."
Carolyn Ford: "Nice. Nice. All right. Well, thanks, Trac. And we'll check in again in probably another 60 days or before."
Trac Bannon: "I know the way things move.It's like we got to check in tomorrow because it will all be different."
Carolyn Ford: "Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. As long as we don't check the actual news before we talk. Like we're working on dated content here today."
Trac Bannon: "I know. I know we are. I mean, we didn't talk about the Strait of Hormuz.No, we didn't talk about drones and the increase in the use of drones. We didn't talk about southern border incursions and any kind of technology and sensors being used to track that. We didn't talk about that. That's dicey yesterday."
Carolyn Ford: "So, yeah, that's right. That's so yesterday. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this episode valuable, be sure to share it, leave a review, and smash that like button to help us reach more people who could benefit from the conversation.I'm Carolyn Ford. Tech Transforms is produced by Show and Tell and sponsored by Owl Cyber Defense. Until next time, stay curious and keep imagining the future."