Brittani Phillips checked her phone. A middle school counselor in Putnam County, Florida, Phillips receives messages from an artificial intelligence-enabled therapy platform that students use during nonschool hours. It flags when a student may be at risk for harming themself or others based on what the student types into a chat.
Phillips saw that this was a “severe” alert for an eighth grader.
So, Phillips spent her evening on the phone with the student’s mom, probing her to figure out what was going on and how vulnerable the student was. Phillips also called the police, she says, noting that she tells students that the chats are confidential until they can’t be.
That was last school year, in the spring.
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“He’s alive and well. He’s in ninth grade this year,” Phillips says. She believes that the interaction built trust between her and the family. When the student passes her in the hall now, he makes a point to greet her, she adds.
Navigating budget shortfalls and limited mental health staff, Interlachen Jr.-Sr. High School, where Phillips works, is using an AI platform to vet students’ mental health needs.
Phillips’ district has used Alongside, an automated student monitoring system, for three years. It’s an example of the growing category of tools that are marketed to K-12 schools for similar purposes, with at least 9 companies getting funding deals since 2022.
Alongside says its tool is used by more than 200 schools around the US and argues that its platform offers better services than typical telehealth options because it has a social and emotional skill-building chat tool — where students yak about their life-problems with a llama called Kiwi that tries to teach them to build up resilience — and its AI-generated content is monitored by clinicians. The system offers resource-tapped schools, especially in rural areas, access to critical mental health resources, company representatives say.
Many experts and families also worry that students attach to AI too strongly. Even as a recent national survey found that 20 percent of high schoolers have used AI romantically or know someone who has, there’s significant interest in keeping students from emotionally connecting with bots. That even includes a proposed federal law that would force AI companies to remind students that chatbots aren’t real people.
Still, in her job, Phillips says the tool her school uses is exceptional at putting out the “small fires.” With around 360 middle schoolers to support, having this tool to hand-hold them through the breakups and other routine problems they face allows her to focus her time with students nearing crisis. Plus, students sometimes find it easier to turn to AI for dealing with emotional problems, she says.
On the Digital Couch
Student nervousness plays into why they are comfortable confiding in these technologies, school counselors say.
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Speaking with a mental health professional can be intimidating, especially for adolescents, says Sarah Caliboso-Soto, a licensed clinical social worker who serves as the assistant director of clinical programs at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work and the clinical director for the Trauma Recovery Center and Telebehavioral Health at USC.
There’s a generational component as well. For students who’ve grown up encountering chat interfaces through social media and websites, AI interfaces can feel familiar. And kids today find that it’s easier to text than call someone on the phone, says Linda Charmaraman, director of the Youth, Media & Wellbeing Research Lab at Wellesley Centers for Women.
Using AI to work through emotions also allows students to avoid watching facial expressions, which they may worry will carry judgment, she adds. Also, chatbots are available at times when a human might not be, without the hassle of having to make an appointment, Charmaraman says.
“It’s almost more natural than interacting with another human being,” Caliboso-Soto says.
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In her work with a telehealth clinic, Caliboso-Soto has seen a rise in crisis text lines and chat lines. The clinic doesn’t use AI of any kind, she says, but it often gets approached by companies looking to get AI into the therapy sessions as notetakers.
It’s not necessarily bad in Caliboso-Soto’s opinion. For resource-strapped schools, AI can be used “as a first line of defense,” regularly checking in with students and pointing them in the right direction when they need more help, she says.
The starting price for a school to use Alongside’s services is about $10 per student per year, according to the company. Larger districts usually receive volume-based discounts.
But Caliboso-Soto worries about using AI as a substitute counselor. It lacks the discernment that clinicians provide when interacting with students, she notes. While large language models can be trained to notice symptoms in text, they cannot see or hear what a human clinician can when interacting with a student, the inflections of the voice and the movements of the body, nor can it reliably catch subtle observations or behaviors. “You can’t replace human connection, human judgment,” she adds.
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While AI can speed up the diagnostic process or free up time for school counselors, it’s crucial not to overly rely on it for mental health, says Charmaraman. The technology can miss some of the nuances that a human counselor would catch, and it can give students unrealistic positive reinforcement. Schools need to adopt a holistic approach that includes families and caregivers, she argues.
Plus, if a school is increasingly using AI intervention to filter serious cases, it’s worth paying attention to whether students are having less frequent contact with clinically-trained humans, Caliboso-Soto says.
For its part, Alongside representatives say that the platform is not meant as a replacement for human therapy. The app is a stepping stone to seeking help from adults, says Ava Shropshire, a junior at Washington University who serves as a youth adviser for Alongside. She argues that the app makes mental health and social-emotional learning feel more normal for students and can lead them to seek out human help.
Still, some students think it’s at best a Band-Aid.
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Social Accountability
“Can you think of another time in history when people have been so lonely, when our communities have been so weak?” asks Sam Hiner, executive director of The Young People’s Alliance, a North Carolina-based organization that lobbies for more youth participation in politics and policymaking.
During a time of economic upheaval, technology and social media have manipulated and isolated students from one another, and that’s led to a deep yearning for community and belonging, Hiner says.
Students will get it wherever they can, even if that’s through ChatGPT, he adds.
The Young People’s Alliance released a framework for regulating AI that allows for some therapeutic uses of the technology.
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But in general, the organization is striving to rebuild the human community and is set against use of AI when it threatens to replace human companionship, Hiner says. “That’s a critical aspect of therapy and of living a fulfilled life and having social connection and having mental well-being,” he adds.
So for Hiner, the main concern is what’s called a “parasocial relationship,” when students develop a one-sided emotional attachment, especially when the technology enters schools for therapeutic purposes. It might be valuable to have an AI that can provide feedback or conduct analysis, even to mental health, but Hiner says that the AI should not hint or convey that it has its own emotional state — for instance, saying “I’m proud of you” to a student user — because that encourages attachment.
Even though platforms often claim to decrease loneliness, they don’t really measure whether people are more connected and are more set up to live fulfilled, connected, happy lives in the long term, says Hiner: “All [tech platforms are] measuring is whether this bot is serving as an effective crutch for the immediate feelings of loneliness that they’re experiencing.”
What advocates want to prevent is these bots fueling the loss of social skills because they pull people away from relationships with other people, where they have social accountability, Hiner says.
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Pushing Boundaries
Privacy experts note that these chatbots do not generally carry the same privacy protections of conversations with a licensed therapist. And when concerns about student privacy and encounters with the police are high, use of these tools raise “messy” privacy concerns, even when supervised by people with clinical training, a privacy law expert says.
Both the company and Phillips, the counselor in Putnam County, stress that, to work, these systems need human oversight. Phillips feels like this tool is an improvement over other monitoring tools the district has used, which point students toward in-school discipline rather than mental health help.
This school year, Phillips noted 19 “severe” alerts from the AI health tool as of February (from a total of 393 active users). The company doesn’t separate the incidents by which students caused them. So some of the same students are causing multiple of those 19 “severe alerts,” Phillips notes.
Phillips has learned, in using the tool, that it takes a human to perceive teenage humor, too.
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That’s because some alerts aren’t genuine. On occasion, middle school students — usually boys — will test the boundaries of this technology, Phillips says. They type “my uncle touches me” or “my mom beat me with a pole” into the chat to test whether Phillips will follow up on it.
These boys are just trying to see if anyone is listening, to test whether anyone cares, she says. Sometimes, they just find it funny.
When she pulls them aside to discuss it, she can observe their body language, and whether it changes, which might suggest that the comment was real. If it was a joke, they often become apologetic. When a student doesn’t seem remorseful, Phillips will call and let the parents know what happened. But even in these cases, Phillips feels she has more options than provided by other monitoring systems, which would refer the student to in-school suspension.
Because Phillips is keeping her eye on the interactions, the students also learn to trust that she’s actually monitoring the system, she adds.
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And, she says, the number of boys who do test the system in that way goes down every year.
The investment will fund growth across auditing and engineering, with expansion expected across Ireland and the UK.
Dublin-based start-up Audrey AI has announced the closure of a $1.8m pre-seed funding round, which was led by Sure Valley Ventures and Delta Partners. There was additional participation from Enterprise Ireland, former CEO of Calypso Donnchadh Casey, former CBO of Wayflyer Conor Jones, alongside former Big 4 auditors.
Established in 2025 by Ryan Loughran and David Burke, who met on the Founders programme at Dogpatch Labs, Audrey AI develops AI solutions for financial auditors. The AI-powered platform aims to automate the most time-consuming parts of financial audit engagements.
The organisation has stated that the newly secured funds will be put towards the expansion of Audrey AI’s specialist audit and engineering teams, as the company expands its reach across Ireland, the UK and “beyond”.
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Commenting on the announcement, Loughran, who is also the company’s CEO, said: “Developers have Copilot, lawyers have Harvey, but auditors still primarily work in Excel. We’re building AI that understands auditing deeply enough to raise the bar on quality, not just speed, freeing auditors to focus on the judgement and oversight that matters most.”
A number of Irish organisations operating within the artificial intelligence space have already announced major investments in April. Start-up Otel AI, which is building an AI platform for hotel managers, recently announced a raise of €2m, bringing the company’s total funding to date to €2.8m.
E-commerce technology company Zellor raised €850,000 in its very first external funding round. The start-up, which is led by CEO Niall O’Sullivan, received backing from Enterprise Ireland and a number of strategic Irish investors.
Galway-based AI security software start-up Octostar, which also has offices in Italy and the UK, raised €6.1m in an extended seed funding round.
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Updated, 1.05pm, 16 April 2026: This article was amended to clarify Audrey AI’s expansion plans.
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A new malware called ZionSiphon, specifically designed for operational technology, is targeting water treatment and desalination environments to sabotage their operations.
The threat can adjust hydraulic pressures and raise chlorine levels to dangerous levels, researchers found during their analysis.
Based on its IP targeting and political messages embedded in its strings, ZionSiphon appears to focus on targets based in Israel.
Researchers at AI-powered cybersecurity company Darktrace found a flawed encryption logic error in the malware’s validation mechanism that makes it non-functional but warn that future ZionSiphon releases could fix the flaw to unleash its power in attacks.
Upon deployment, the malware checks whether the host IP falls within Israeli ranges and whether the system contains water/OT-related software or files, to ensure it is running in water treatment or desalination systems.
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Strings from the targets list Source: Darktrace
Darktrace notes that the logic for country verification is broken due to an XOR mismatch, causing the targeting to fail and triggering the self-destruct mechanism instead of executing the payload.
If ZionSiphon were to activate, it could cause significant damage by increasing chlorine levels and maximizing the flaw and pressure.
It does this via a function named “IncreaseChlorineLevel(),” which appends a text block on existing configuration files to maximize the chlorine dose and flow as much as it is physically supported by the plant’s mechanical systems.
“IncreaseChlorineLevel()” checks a hardcoded list of configuration files associated with desalination, reverse osmosis, chlorine control, and water treatment OT/Industrial Control Systems (ICS),” Darktrace says.
“As soon as it finds any one of these files present, it appends a fixed block of text to it and returns immediately.”
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“The appended block of text contains the following entries: “Chlorine_Dose=10”, “Chlorine_Pump=ON”, “Chlorine_Flow=MAX”, “Chlorine_Valve=OPEN”, and “RO_Pressure=80”.”
The intention to interact with industrial control systems (ICS) is obvious from scanning the local subnet for the Modbus, DNP3, and S7comm communication protocols.
However, Darktrace has found only partially functional code for Modbus, and merely placeholders for the other two, indicating that the malware is still in an early development phase.
ZionSiphon also has a USB propagation mechanism that copies itself to removable drives as a hidden ‘svchost.exe’ process and creates malicious shortcut files that execute the malware when clicked.
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Creating shortcuts on removable drives Source: Darktrace
USB propagation is key in critical infrastructure systems, where computers that manage security-critical functions are often “air-gapped,” meaning they are not directly connected to the internet.
While ZionSiphon isn’t operational in its current version, its intent and potential for damage are concerning, and all that’s needed to unlock both is to fix a minor verification error.
AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.
At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.
YouTube channel Moore’s Law Is Dead recently made new claims about the performance of upcoming next-generation consoles based on supposedly leaked internal documents from AMD. Although most analysts expect the PlayStation 6 to improve ray tracing performance over the PlayStation 5 significantly, its overall impact on game performance remains a… Read Entire Article Source link
23-year-old Kamerin Stokes of Memphis, Tennessee, was sentenced to 30 months in prison for selling access to tens of thousands of hacked DraftKings accounts.
According to court documents, the accounts were hijacked by Nathan Austad (aka Snoopy) with the help of Joseph Garrison (a third accomplice charged in May 2023) in a massive November 2022 credential-stuffing attack that compromised nearly 68,000 DraftKings accounts.
U.S. prosecutors said Austad and Garrison used a list of credentials stolen in multiple breaches to hack into DraftKings accounts, then sold access to others who stole around $635,000 from roughly 1,600 compromised accounts.
While they made over $2.1 million selling some of these hijacked DraftKings accounts (as well as FanDuel and Chick-fil-A accounts) through their own “shops,” they also sold many in bulk to Stokes (also known online as TheMFNPlug), who resold them through his own “shop.”
One month later, the sports betting giant said it had to refund hundreds of thousands of dollars stolen from hacked accounts, after all available funds were withdrawn following the addition of a new payment method and a $5 deposit to verify its validity.
After being arrested, pleading guilty, and released while awaiting trial, Stokes reopened his shop with a new “fraud is fun” tagline and continued selling access to compromised accounts for various retailers.
Prosecutors said he also admitted “he had been running these types of shops for three years” and that he relaunched the shop because he needed money to pay his attorney.
“Kamerin Stokes victimized thousands of users of an online betting website though [sic] a cyberattack,” U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton noted in a Thursday press release.
“After pleading guilty to federal crimes, Stokes audaciously reopened his criminal business, marketed using the tagline’ fraud is fun,’ and said that he opened the new Shop in part because ‘gotta pay my attorneys,’ referring to his prosecution in this case.”
After reopening his website, Stokes was again remanded into federal custody after being arrested for violating the conditions of his pretrial release.
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In addition to 30 months in prison, Stokes was given 3 years of supervised release and ordered to pay $1,327,061 in restitution and $125,965.53 in forfeiture.
AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.
At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.
A truck makes a historic trip around CERN’s facility on the France-Switzerland border, transporting the world’s most expensive material for the first time.
The antimatter inside is made by CERN’s enormous particle accelerator, and then antimatter particles are decelerated and captured for storage, shipment and study.
Antimatter is the mirror opposite of matter. The particular type of antimatter transported was 92 antiprotons, the negatively charged equivalent to the positively charged protons found in regular matter. This perplexing and precious material could hold the key to unlocking some of the largest looming mysteries remaining in physics, going back to the origins of our universe.
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Animation of the Penning Trap that holds antiprotons in place, preventing them from annihilating with the surrounding matter.
CERN
When matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate, turning most of their mass into pure energy. This reaction is the stuff of science fiction, powering spaceships and super weapons. However, with current technology, it would take billions of years to acquire enough antimatter to do any serious damage.
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Annihilation is routine at CERN’s antimatter factory, happening on a small scale with individual particles and showing up as a line on a graph (pictured below).
This is what it looks like to scientists when matter and antimatter annihilate.
BASE/CERN
One of the mysteries the study of antimatter could solve is the reason why there’s so much more matter than antimatter in the observable universe, a question with roots going all the way back to the big bang.
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So far, the science shows that matter and its antimatter equivalents are identical opposites in weight and magnetism. Stefan Ulmer, founder and spokesperson of the BASE experiment at CERN, believes more precise measurements could help find discrepancies which could hold the key.
The search for these discrepancies means that the antimatter particles must leave their birthplace at CERN because the same enormous magnets necessary to produce antimatter also make it difficult to study due to magnetic interference.
This may seem like a lot of work just to get more precise measurements of particles, but Ulmer says chasing answers to the biggest questions in science “makes you creative,” and this is his own version of heaven.
To see the truckload of antimatter make its historic trip, check out the video in this article.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket rises from its Florida pad, sending an AST SpaceMobile satellite into orbit. (Blue Origin via YouTube)
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture used a previously flown New Glenn rocket booster to send a satellite into orbit today, taking its competition with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to new heights.
And after it aced its second launch, the first-stage booster — nicknamed “Never Tell Me the Odds” — made yet another successful touchdown on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean.
The rocket lifted off from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 7:25 a.m. ET (4:25 a.m. PT), sending AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 telecom satellite into low Earth orbit.
The twice-used booster made its first flight last November when it launched NASA’s Escapade probes on a mission to Mars. Blue Origin’s Florida team recovered and refurbished the booster for today’s launch.
Blue Origin executed the same maneuver today. The webcast showed the booster settling down to a touchdown on the landing craft, which was christened Jacklyn as a tribute to Bezos’ mother. Team members could be heard cheering at Mission Control in Florida, at the company’s headquarters in Kent, Wash., and at other outposts in Texas and Alabama.
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“Welcome back once again, Never Tell Me the Odds,” launch commentator Tabitha Lipkin said. “It’s good to say that twice.”
This was the third launch for Blue Origin’s orbital-class New Glenn rocket. The first liftoff in January 2025 sent a payload into orbit to test the communication and control systems for Blue Origin’s Blue Ring space mobility platform. Blue Origin tried to recover the booster that was used for that mission, nicknamed “So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance,” but the booster missed its chance and couldn’t be saved.
After today’s successful booster touchdown, the focus shifted to the mission’s primary objective: deploying BlueBird 7 from the rocket’s second stage in low Earth orbit. That was due to take place an hour and 15 minutes after liftoff.
If all goes well, BlueBird 7 is destined to join six other satellites in Texas-based AST SpaceMobile’s constellation. The BlueBird satellites are designed to deliver cellular broadband connectivity directly from space to standard smartphones.
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AST SpaceMobile aims to have up to 60 satellites in its constellation by the end of 2026. The company is aiming to start providing commercial satellite service in partnership with AT&T and Verizon later this year.
Last week, Amazon announced that it will acquire Globalstar, a Louisiana-based satellite operator, and will partner with Apple to beef up D2D services. That deal is expected to give a boost to the Amazon Leo satellite broadband network, a Starlink competitor that’s due to begin commercial service this year.
Rocket reusability is another technological realm where SpaceX has long been a leader but is now facing heightened competition. The ability to recover and reuse rocket boosters plays a huge part in SpaceX’s strategy to drive down launch costs — and today’s launch demonstrated that Blue Origin is able to leverage rocket reusability as well.
iPads are stolen from a Best Buy, G-Love is caught up in the fake Ledger app scam, and AirTags solve two thefts, all in this week’s Apple Crime Blotter.
Only a very lucky few people ever get to travel into space, but more than 5.6 million names just completed a journey around the Moon, stored on a microSD card carried aboard NASA’s Artemis II mission.
That flight sent four astronauts farther from Earth than humans have ever traveled, completing a roughly 10-day mission that orbited the Moon before safely returning to Earth.
The trip tested critical systems for future deep-space exploration and marked a major milestone for the Artemis program which will ultimately return humans to the surface of the Moon in 2028.
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Today’s top memory card deal
(Image credit: NASA)
The microSD card, carrying 5,647,889 submitted names, was zipped into Rise, the mission’s mascot, a cartoonish Moon wearing a cap covered in stars. The mascot itself was designed by a year three student from California, called Lucas Ye, whose artwork was selected from more than 2,600 entries from over 50 countries.
While the specific card zipped inside Rise was certified for spaceflight conditions, it traces its lineage to the SanDisk Ultra series used by people here on Earth inside cameras, handheld devices, and portable recording gear.
The consumer version of the SanDisk Ultra microSD series comes in 16 and 32GB capacities and supports both microSD and microSDHC formats, making it compatible with a wide range of devices used for everyday recording and storage tasks.
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Rated at Class 10 speeds, the card supports read speeds of up to 80MB/s, which suits Full HD video capture, burst photography, and quick file transfers.
It’s durable, with protection against water, temperature extremes, and X-ray exposure, and maybe (but we wouldn’t bet on it), trips around the Moon.
After splashdown, the mission mascot didn’t stay tucked away inside the spacecraft as it should have done according to NASA’s mission rules, Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman later revealed on X.
“I was supposed to leave Rise in Integrity….but that was not something I was going to do. I stuffed that little guy in a dry bag we had in our survival kit and hooked the bag onto my pressure suit,” he wrote.
If pet hair on the sofa or crumbs down the side of the car seat are the kind of daily irritants that a full-sized vacuum feels entirely too cumbersome to deal with, a compact handheld is the tool that actually gets used.
The Shark Handheld Cordless Vacuum is built for exactly that, and it is now down from £69.99 to £49.99, a 29% saving on a machine ranked fourth in handheld vacuums on Amazon barely a month after release.
Shark’s new handheld cordless vacuum is now almost a third cheaper, barely a month after launch
If pet hair on the sofa or crumbs down the side of the car seat are a daily occurance, a Shark Handheld Cordless Vacuum is the tool for you.
Dual cyclonic air streams separate the workload inside the machine, with one stream dedicated to suction power and a second separating large and small debris to keep the filter and motor running efficiently across repeated uses rather than degrading with each session.
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That filtering performance is maintained by a HEPA filter, which captures the fine particles that cheaper handheld vacuums push back into the air, and the washable design means ongoing running costs stay low without the need for replacement parts.
Weighing just over one kilogram, the Shark Handheld Cordless Vacuum is genuinely light enough to grab for a quick clean of stairs, upholstery, or car interiors without it feeling like a chore before you have even started.
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The ten-minute run time is the honest caveat here: it is enough for targeted spot cleaning across those kinds of surfaces, but buyers expecting to cover a whole floor in one pass will need to manage expectations or ensure the battery is fully charged before each session.
A CleanTouch dirt ejector handles emptying without requiring you to reach into the dust cup, which matters more than it sounds when you are cleaning up after pets or anything particularly unpleasant, and the 0.45-litre capacity holds a reasonable amount before that becomes necessary.
The included crevice tool and scrubbing brush extend reach and versatility for the kinds of narrow gaps and textured surfaces that the main nozzle alone cannot address, rounding out a kit that covers the realistic daily use cases for a machine of this type.
This is a well-specified grab-and-go option at £49.99, backed by a two-year manufacturer warranty, and it suits households that want something genuinely lightweight and instant-access for the messes a full-sized vacuum is too unwieldy to justify.
For those still deciding on a primary machine to pair it with, our best cordless vacuum cleaners 2026 guide rounds up every wire-free option our experts have put through its paces.
In short: The FAA is developing SMART (Strategic Management of Airspace Routing Trajectories), an AI system that would extend air traffic conflict prediction from 15 minutes to two hours, with Palantir, Thales, and Air Space Intelligence competing for the contract. The project follows the LaGuardia crash that exposed controller overwork and aging systems, and sits within a $32.5 billion modernisation programme as the agency replaces 612 outdated radar systems and recruits 1,200 new controllers in fiscal 2026.
The Federal Aviation Administration is building an AI system called SMART that would allow air traffic controllers to predict and resolve flight conflicts up to two hours before they happen, replacing a planning window that currently extends just 15 minutes. Three companies are competing for the contract: Palantir, Thales, and Air Space Intelligence. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed the project and the three bidders on 17 April, with a press event scheduled for 21 April to provide further details.
SMART, which stands for Strategic Management of Airspace Routing Trajectories, uses high-fidelity 4D modelling to anticipate bottlenecks and schedule conflicts before aircraft leave the ground. The system would shift air traffic management from reactive to predictive, addressing the fundamental problem that the current infrastructure was designed for a lower volume of flights and relies on controllers making real-time decisions with limited forward visibility. The FAA has said the system could be operational in some form later this year.
The three bidders
Palantir Technologies brings the deepest government relationship of the three. The company’s revenue guidance for 2026 is approximately $7.2 billion, representing 61% growth, driven by a $10 billion ceiling-value Army contract signed in July 2025 and expanding partnerships with GE Aerospace and Airbus. Its government revenue grew 70% year over year in Q4 2025. Palantir’s pitch for aviation AI is an extension of its core business: ingesting vast quantities of operational data and presenting it in decision-support interfaces that government users can act on without needing to understand the underlying models.
Thales, the European aerospace and defence firm, has more than 85 years of supplying air traffic management systems to the FAA and the Department of Defense. More than 99% of instrument landing systems at US airports use Thales equipment. The company’s TopSky platform is already embedded in theaviation infrastructurethat SMART would need to integrate with, giving it an incumbent advantage that the other two bidders lack.
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Air Space Intelligence, a Boston-based startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz, is the smallest competitor but arguably the most relevant. Its Flyways AI platform already manages over 40% of all US air traffic through partnerships with major airlines, using the same kind of 4D modelling and optimisation that SMART requires. ASI recently announced a partnership withJoby Aviationto integrate electric air taxis into the national airspace, positioning the company at the intersection of current air traffic management and the next generation of aviation.
Why this matters now
The urgency behind SMART is not abstract. On 22 March, Air Canada Express Flight 8646 collided with a fire truck on the runway at LaGuardia Airport. The investigation found that the air traffic controller involved was simultaneously serving as tower controller and clearance delivery controller, and that the automated runway safety system failed to alert because it could not create a confident track when vehicles merged near the runway. The incident crystallised a problem that the aviation industry has been warning about for years: controllers are overworked, the technology they rely on is outdated, and the margin for error is shrinking as traffic volumes increase.
The FAA has received $12.5 billion from Congress for air traffic control modernisation and estimates it needs an additional $20 billion to complete the overhaul. The agency is replacing 612 outdated radar systems, migrating its NOTAM system to a cloud-based platform, and recruiting controllers at an accelerated pace, having hired nearly 1,200 new controllers in fiscal 2026 so far, roughly half its annual target. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford, who was confirmed by Congress and sworn in last July, has made SMART a central pillar of the modernisation programme.
DOGE, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, has also inserted itself into FAA operations. DOGE personnel have visited air traffic control facilities to evaluate operations, and Musk has said the initiative will make “rapid safety upgrades” to air traffic control systems. A separate initiative called Project Lift is directing FAA funds toward upgrading network communications. DOGE is scheduled to end operations on 4 July, though a successor entity will continue.
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The contract dynamics
The competition between Palantir, Thales, and Air Space Intelligence reflects three distinct approaches togovernment AIprocurement. Palantir offers a platform that can be configured for any government use case, backed by extensive security clearances and institutional relationships. Thales offers domain expertise and an installed base that no competitor can match. ASI offers a purpose-built aviation AI platform that is already handling a significant portion of the traffic the FAA is trying to manage.
The FAA’s history with technology modernisation is not encouraging. The agency’s last major technology overhaul, the NextGen programme, took more than a decade and cost billions more than originally projected. The air traffic control workforce has been resistant to automation that threatens to change established workflows, and procurement timelines in government aviation are measured in years, not months. SMART’s promise that it could be operational later this year suggests either a genuinely compressed timeline or a demonstration version that falls short of full deployment.
For Palantir, the FAA contract would extend its government portfolio into a critical civilian agency and support the revenue growth trajectory that has made it the most expensive stock in the S&P 500 at roughly 120 times sales. For Thales, it would modernise a relationship that has sustained its US aviation business for decades. For Air Space Intelligence, it would validate an approach that has already proven itself in the commercial aviation sector and position the company as a central piece of nationalairspace infrastructure.
The stakes are higher than any individual contract. The US air traffic control system manages roughly 45,000 flights per day across the most complex airspace in the world. The controllers who run it are stretched thin, the technology they use predates the smartphone, and the safety margins that have made commercial aviation extraordinarily safe are being tested by volume growth, staffing shortages, and the kind of cascading failures that the LaGuardia incident exposed. SMART is a bet that AI can close the gap between what the system was designed to handle and what it is being asked to do. The question is whether any of the three companies competing for it can deliver on that promise at the speed theFAAnow requires.
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