Under the OTA agreement, Code Metal will advance WarMatrix, a modelling and simulation platform that brings AI capabilities to the Department’s existing ecosystem while building on decades of trusted investment.
Code Metal, a leader in verifiable code translation for mission-critical industries, has been awarded a US$80 million Other Transaction Authority (OTA) contract with the US Department of War (DoW) to advance WarMatrix – the AI-enabled modelling and simulation platform Code Metal built in partnership with the US Air Force.
The contract will fund Code Metal’s work in applying its provable AI technology to orchestrate long-trusted systems, such as AFSIM (the Advanced Framework for Simulation, Integration and Modeling), across the Department’s wargaming and operational analysis efforts.
Under the contract, Code Metal’s platform will enable warfighters to develop, evaluate and adapt courses of action in hours rather than months, with applications spanning operational planning, education, force design, mission engineering and campaign analysis.
The work is possible because Code Metal’s technology can mathematically verify that a model behaves the same way after transformation as it did before, allowing AI to run on top of the DoW’s existing modelling and simulation ecosystem, modernised for AI, without invalidating the decades of testing behind it.
That distinction matters because the DoW’s modelling and simulation ecosystem reflects billions of dollars in investment and decades of warfighter validation; the trust it has earned would be difficult to replace and even harder to rebuild.
However, given that the nature of conflict is evolving faster than today’s decision-making systems were designed to support, something must change: rip, replace and re-validate, or modernise what already works.
Under this contract, Code Metal will lead the modernisation of existing systems, aiming to bring AI to systems that have already earned the DoW’s trust rather than asking it to rebuild that trust from scratch.
“Code Metal is proud to support the Department of War’s efforts to modernize and accelerate some of the most sophisticated modeling and simulation environments in the world, which it has spent decades building,” said Peter Morales, co-founder and CEO, Code Metal. “The opportunity is not to replace that investment, but to make it usable, adaptable, and AI-ready without breaking what makes it trustworthy. With WarMatrix, planners don’t need to be software engineers to work with complex AI, models, and simulations together; the system handles the complexity, and judgment stays with the warfighter.”
The contract extends a pattern already underway across Code Metal’s commercial business: helping mission-critical organisations bring AI to the systems they already trust rather than replacing them.
Code Metal’s customers include the US Air Force, RTX, Toshiba and L3Harris, spanning defence, aerospace, automotive, semiconductor and communications sectors.
“National security is the most demanding proving ground there is,” said Laura Shen, EVP of Growth, Code Metal. “Across industries we work in – defense, automotive, semiconductor, telecommunications – decisions depend on decades of validated software, but that software must be modernized and advanced. We are proud to help organizations across these industries move faster without giving up that confidence.”
