By Prineha Narang
My career has been built at the edge of what is physically possible, predicting exotic quantum states, developing sensors that exploit the laws of nature, and teaching machines to reason about the physical world.
For a long time, that work lived in journals and laboratories, but those technologies are now being rapidly adopted for military applications, and not just by the United States and its allies.
What just months ago seemed like a five-year problem of global technological competition has now compressed to an urgent 18-month national security sprint.
The U.S. is facing a daunting race to develop and field advanced capabilities such as AI and quantum sensors on the battlefield, and many of the scientists who can help win that race are in university physics departments and at deep-tech startups.
The boundary between fundamental research and fielded capability is collapsing, and for American national security and the military, this is both a challenge and an opening.
The public falling-out between Anthropic and the Pentagon is a source of serious concern, as the dispute has left the impression of a wider chill within the deep-tech community.
The dispute was rooted in Anthropic’s insistence that its AI not be used for autonomous lethal targeting or domestic mass surveillance, and the Trump administration’s decision to terminate the relationship.
Disengagement from defense work is not principled, it is abdication, because America’s adversaries are counting on technologists and the deep-tech community to stay on the sidelines.
China will not pause its next-generation computing research programs because a tech company has a principled disagreement with the Pentagon’s contracting terms, and Russia will not halt its electronic warfare development.
When it comes to quantum technologies, China has kept pace with every major American advance, with corresponding announcements from the People’s Republic following almost immediately after U.S. breakthroughs, including the Jiuzhang and Zuchongzhi quantum computers.
Modern platforms carry hundreds of sensor types simultaneously, and quantum sensors can exceed the limits of their classical counterparts, seeing parts of the electromagnetic spectrum where we have historically been blind.
In the Strait of Hormuz, where commercial and military traffic converge, decisions must be made in seconds, and the ability to fuse sensor data at the edge is the difference between early warning and catastrophic surprise.
The critical challenge is no longer producing data but processing it, as an army of analysts working at human speed cannot keep pace with what modern conflict demands.
The version of AI that matters most for national security is not large language models running in data centers, but lean, physics-constrained models deployed in contested environments with intermittent connectivity and no margin for error.
The Anthropic episode should be read as evidence of how urgently the defense ecosystem and the technology community need to build workable terms of engagement, and the best minds in physics, AI, and advanced sensing must not look away from defense.
Dr. Prineha Narang, a quantum scientist and innovator, is a professor at UCLA, trustee at the California Institute of Technology, and partner at DCVC, a leading deep-tech venture capital firm.
