Artificial Intelligence for National Security

The Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has a critical mission: safeguarding U.S. national security by maintaining the safety, security, and reliability of the nuclear stockpile while preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons and materials. This complex and high-stakes mission demands innovative solutions, and AI is proving to be a powerful tool to enhance our capabilities significantly. 

AI is augmenting key aspects of NNSA's mission: 

• Accelerating Stockpile Stewardship: Maintaining the safety, security and reliability of the nuclear stockpile requires extensive modeling and simulation. AI-powered surrogate models are dramatically speeding up these simulations, allowing for more comprehensive analysis and design optimization. This includes creating digital twins of existing weapons systems to predict aging and potential performance issues. 
• Transforming the Nuclear Weapons Lifecycle: NNSA is exploring using AI to streamline and accelerate the entire lifecycle of nuclear weapons development, from the discovery of new materials to design optimization, manufacturing, and ongoing surveillance. This has the potential to reduce timelines and costs while improving safety and reliability. Through AI-enhanced manufacturing and certification, it may be possible to drastically reduce the time to field a new weapon system. 
• Enhancing Nonproliferation Efforts: Detecting and characterizing illicit nuclear activities worldwide requires analyzing vast quantities of data from diverse sources. AI tools are enhancing pattern recognition, anomaly detection, and signal processing for early and reliable detection and localization of potential nuclear proliferation efforts. 

Recognizing that advances at the frontier of AI will have significant implications for national security, DOE and NNSA are leading work to help understand and mitigate the risks associated with AI systems, improve the performance and efficiency of AI systems, and strengthen the U.S. AI ecosystem. DOE leads, via NNSA, the safety testing and systematic evaluations of frontier AI models on behalf of the U.S. government to assess nuclear and radiological risk. DOE also coordinates across the U.S. government on assessments of chemical, biological, and other threats.