A Winding Road Before Scaling-Up? Defense AI in France

France recognized the importance of AI in 2017 when it launched a national strategy to become a world leader in AI. The French Ministry of the Armed Forces published the strategy “AI in service of defense” in 2019, outlining ethical frameworks, infrastructure development, research priorities, and international collaboration. This strategy aimed to create trustworthy AI for defense applications while also embracing dual-use advances on AI in the commercial sector. If AI governance has taken shape, the French MoD’s action can appear very fragmented for the defense ecosystem considering the requirements of different military services, the Procurement Agency (DGA) and the new entities created as part of the Armed Forces digital transformation. To implement its sovereign AI strategy, France’s ecosystems benefits from a relatively dense academic and research base as well as industrial companies (AI startups, specialized SME and traditional Defense players adapting their strategy). In this context, ARTEMIS.IA emerged in 2017, a programme originally designed to build the defence AI ecosystem. In addition, the Armed Forces have adopted a development by trial approach. This profusion of initiatives at various levels and taken by different military branches may illustrate the lack of a centralized data-sharing policy, favoring ad hoc development frameworks. Moreover, experiments conducted so far have identified major roadblocks such as the need to develop adequate digital infrastructure including clouds, access to users, and adjusting budgetary and contractual mechanisms to the reality of agile software development. The updated defense AI strategy expected in 2024 will need to take these elements into account to meet the challenges of developing trusted AI techniques and solutions.