Thunderforge Brings AI Agents to Wargames
IEEE Spectrum - AI
Jul 23, 2025 13:00
Shannon Cuthrell
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Summary
The Defense Innovation Unit’s Thunderforge project is developing an agentic AI system that uses multiple digital agents to critique and improve military war plans by running parallel analyses and identifying overlooked vulnerabilities. Recently tested by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Thunderforge aims to integrate with existing defense software and simulations to generate realistic military scenarios. This initiative highlights the growing role of advanced AI agents in national security, emphasizing their potential to enhance strategic planning and decision-making in complex environments.
The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), part of the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), is leading an experimental project, Thunderforge, to build a custom agentic AI system with multiple digital “agents” critiquing war plans across different military domains, running parallel analyses, and flagging potential weaknesses neglected by human planners. The U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) tested some of Thunderforge’s AI capabilities during a tabletop exercise in June. The project, first announced in March, remains in the early stages, with an initial rollout targeting commanders and planners across INDOPACOM and its sister command in Europe (EUCOM). Ultimately, the system will query internal databases, run DoD-grade simulations, and integrate with pre-existing software, such as DARPA’s SAFE-SiM modeling and simulation architecture, to create vast numbers of realistic and plausible military scenarios for study. California-based Scale AI is steering the project, with Microsoft supplying its l