Artificial Intelligence for Defense & National Security

AI for Defense & National Security – Cipher Brief CEO & Publisher Suzanne Kelly sits down with David Appel, Vice President, Global Government National Security & Defense at Amazon Web Services (AWS), for a rapid-fire conversation at the 2025 Cipher Brief Threat Conference.

They cover where AI is actually moving the mission today - Agentic AI for command & control, predictive maintenance (yes, even for nuclear submarines), interoperability with allies, and the leadership culture required to move at speed.

Appel also shares concrete examples from across industries (F1 race car telemetry, PGA Tour ball-tracking, healthcare and Traumatic Brain Injury research) that are informing defense use cases, and how partnerships with government, academia, and industry are training talent and hardening the ecosystem.

What you’ll learn
• AWS focuses on four pillars: infrastructure, education, partner ecosystem, mission services
• How agentic AI can bridge legacy C2 systems to accelerate decisions
• Why top-down, “ruthless” leadership, empowered to take risks, is essential to scale real outcomes
• Lessons from commercial data-driven operations (F1: 1.1M data points/sec)
• Interoperability in practice (e.g., AWS Wickr real-time translation in NATO exercise)
• Balancing guardrails with rapid adoption (incl. Amazon Bedrock access to multiple LLMs)
• The path ahead: AI now, quantum on the horizon - and competing with adversaries that move without our bureaucratic friction.

Chapters
00:12 Intro
01:09 The near future of AI in national security
02:20 Allies, academia & industry partnerships
03:26 Infra & education (20M+ cloud/AI training commitment)
04:39 Cross-industry lessons (PGA, F1)
05:58 “Ruthless, top-down” leadership for speed
06:51 Where to apply now: autonomous systems & predictive maintenance
07:33 Agentic AI across legacy command-and-control
08:22 Customer-obsessed culture at AWS
09:18 Interoperability & secure comms (AWS Wickr, live translation)
10:30 Bright spots from healthcare & TBI research
11:48 Competing with adversaries; move fast despite bureaucracy
13:19 Building a nation-scale partnership model
14:22 What the public should know; optimism & prep for quantum
16:47 Guardrails + Amazon Bedrock
17:40 Exponential curve ahead
18:40 Closing thoughts
19:26 Talent exchanges between gov & industry
20:17 Speaking a common language about “the cloud”
21:03 Wrap

About the series
This interview is part of The Cipher Brief’s post-conference debriefs with leaders at the intersection of technology and national security.

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