Donovan (Scale AI)

A US defense generative-AI decision-support and agent-orchestration platform that lets military users query classified data, build mission-tailored AI agents and compress planning workflows.

Overview

Donovan is Scale AI's federal defense-AI platform for military planning, intelligence fusion and decision support. It is not itself a large language model; Scale and defense-industry reporting describe it as an application and orchestration layer that gives operators access to LLMs, mission data, evaluation tools and no-code agent workflows on government networks. The platform sits in the same command-software class as Palantir AIP and Anduril Lattice, but its starting point is Scale AI's data-engineering and model-evaluation business rather than a legacy battlefield-management system.

Scale describes Donovan as a platform to help operators, analysts and commanders "understand, plan, and act in minutes instead of weeks" by connecting operational data, models and mission-specific workflows inside controlled environments, according to Scale AI. Its public defense profile grew from the May 2023 deployment with the US Army's XVIII Airborne Corps, which Scale and Business Wire described as the first LLM deployment on a US government classified network through Business Wire.

Development

Scale AI unveiled Donovan on 10 May 2023 with the XVIII Airborne Corps partnership, framing the system as a classified-network platform for ingesting more than 100,000 pages of live operational data and making that material queryable in natural language, according to Business Wire. Potomac Officers Club's account of the same rollout described Donovan as supporting commanders, intelligence analysts and planning staffs through faster document search, operational context and planning-cycle support on classified infrastructure via Potomac Officers Club.

By 2024, Scale AI had added Defense Llama, a national-security fine-tune of Meta's Llama 3, to the Donovan ecosystem. DefenseScoop reported that the model was accessible only through controlled government hubs housed within Donovan and was intended for integration with command-and-control systems, intelligence tools and decision-support workflows, according to DefenseScoop. This marked Donovan's evolution from an LLM-access and document-analysis layer toward a broader platform for defense-specific model orchestration.

The next major public inflection was Thunderforge. On 5 March 2025, the Defense Innovation Unit awarded Scale AI the prime prototype contract for Thunderforge, described by DIU as a flagship effort to apply AI to military planning and operations; the program uses Scale's agentic applications and test-and-evaluation expertise alongside Anduril's Lattice and Microsoft-enabled LLMs, according to DIU. Thunderforge is related to Donovan's technology family, but the public record treats it as a distinct multi-vendor prototype program rather than a simple Donovan rebrand.

In September 2025, the Pentagon's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office awarded Scale an enterprise Production Other Transaction Authority agreement with a $100 million ceiling, later expanded in May 2026 to $500 million because demand exceeded the original ceiling, according to Scale AI. Bloomberg and Forbes framed the enlarged vehicle as one of the larger Pentagon AI-procurement moves of the period and noted Scale AI's Meta ownership context via Bloomberg and Forbes.

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