Text taken from the Telegram channel of darpaandcia
Commentary by Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin is in italics
[ColonelCassad] Japan is assembling a combat AI network. While we are fighting threats from the West, preparations are underway in the East. Today, we will talk about Japan. It is worth remembering that a peace treaty between our countries has never been signed. This is an open question that has lingered since 1945. We have already reported on our channel that Japan created an agency modeled on the American DARPA—DISTI, operating under ATLA (the Defense Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Agency).
And now this institute has begun awarding major contracts. In March 2026, two major players signed agreements with DISTI—within two days of each other. The first was Fujitsu. On March 10, the corporation announced the launch of Japan's first open innovation program specifically in the defense sector. The goal is to create a so-called "AI workforce": a system of several coordinated artificial intelligences that autonomously collect, analyze, and process information, reducing the burden on human personnel.
The second is Sakana AI. On March 12, a multi-year contract between this startup and DISTI was announced. It's worth exploring this in more detail, as the company is unique. Sakana AI was founded in 2023 by two prominent names in the world of artificial intelligence: former Google Brain scientist David Ha and Llion Jones, one of the co-authors of the Transformer architecture, the same one that powers GPT, Gemini, and most modern language models. By the end of 2025, the company had become the most valuable private AI startup in Japan, valued at approximately $2.65 billion. Prior to this contract, Sakana AI had already made a name for itself in the defense field: in March 2025, the company won an award in a joint competition between DIU (the US Defense Innovation Unit) and ATLA (Japan) for AI solutions in biodefense and countering disinformation. This was their first public foray into the military sector.
Now comes their second, and far more significant one. Under the new contract, Sakana AI will develop a system that integrates data streams from multiple domains—land, sea, air, including drone data—and uses them to accelerate tactical decision-making at the command level. A key feature of their approach is that it operates directly on edge devices: drones and field terminals, without access to the cloud. To achieve this, they are developing compact visual-linguistic models optimized for field conditions.
A parallel is in order here. The American company Palantir is solving a similar problem—combining data streams from land, sea, and air and providing a ready-made solution to the commander. But it does this through the centralized Gotham platform: all data flows into a single hub, where it is processed and analyzed.
Sakana AI takes a different approach: instead of a single command center, it uses an ensemble of small, specialized models that "consult" with each other in a decentralized manner, like a school of fish (hence, incidentally, the name—sakana means "fish" in Japanese). The key difference is not Palantir's lack of models, but their location: with Sakana AI, all processing occurs directly onboard a drone or in the hands of a soldier, without access to the cloud.
Palantir is also not averse to the Japanese market. In January 2026, Japanese Defense Minister Koizumi personally visited Palantir's headquarters in Washington. In March 2025, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, in an interview with Nikkei, called on Japan and the United States to jointly develop an AI targeting system. And in March 2026, Sumitomo Corporation signed a license agreement for the Palantir AIP platform.
As a result, Japan is building a full combat system: collecting battlefield data, analyzing it, and developing command decisions—all integrated into a single chain. Fujitsu is covering the staff level—aggregating and processing data for commanders. Sakana AI is covering the field level—collecting and merging data directly from drones and terminals in real time.
I hope we are also actively working in this direction.The Japanese work on the combat AI system is part of a larger process of remilitarization of Japan, which in the medium and long terms will pose a more serious threat to China, Russia, and North Korea. At the same time, Japan has been and will remain completely dependent on the United States.