Casimir Inc., a technology startup that made headlines with its controversial vacuum energy chip, MicroSparc, has received a financial award from the United States Air Force Research Lab’s SpaceWERX to advance the technology toward practical defense applications.

According to a company statement, the Phase I award, part of the Department of the Air Force’s (DAF) broader Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program, will fund Casimir to explore the technical viability of its vacuum energy chip, which The Debrief previously revealed exclusively.

Although a Phase I award does not guarantee future financial support, the new ‘proof-of-concept and potential’ award could put Casimir in line for future Phase II and Phase III awards from SpaceWERX, depending on the success of this phase.

The company told The Debrief that Casimir’s goal “remains full commercialization of MicroSparc by 2028.”

SpaceWERX Award Will Assess Feasibility of Casimir’s MicroSparc Technology

According to the SpaceWERX site, STTR Phase I grants are awarded to companies to “prove the technical merit and commercial viability of your innovative idea.”

“SpaceWERX manages the United States Space Force’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs, awarding contracts to startups and small businesses developing technologies with commercial and defense applications that strengthen the U.S. defense industrial base since 2019,” the SpaceWERX site explained.

 

Although Casimir did not provide financial or timeline specifics, SpaceWERX guidelines indicate these awards typically range from $75K to $180K and last three to 12 months. As an “Open Topic” award, Casimir’s work will also include what the SpaceWERX site describes as “a critical customer discovery phase.”

The company said the new award will allow the team to focus on “developing Casimir’s fully independent solid-state generator to address the most pressing challenges in the Department of the Air Force (DAF).”

“The Phase I work is focused on validating Casimir’s independent solid-state generator design against DAF requirements for systems operating in remote or hard-to-service environments,” a company spokesperson told The Debrief. “This is especially notable because it expresses a desire and need for Casimir’s tech in mission-critical environments.”

“The Underlying Physics” Are Not New

Former NASA Eagleworks researcher and Casimir co-founder Dr. Harold G. “Sonny” White later pursued research involving engineered Casimir cavities at the Limitless Space Institute, including work supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

“This concept became a central part of our DARPA Defense Sciences Office (DSO) research effort at the Limitless Space Institute, where DARPA funded early theoretical and experimental investigations into custom Casimir cavity structures and their interaction with the quantum vacuum,” White previously told The Debrief.

Although the company previously said it already has functioning prototypes, many scientists have challenged the technology’s validity, with some labeling the MicroSparc a “perpetual motion” machine that violates the laws of physics. When describing the concept to The Debrief, Dr. White seemed to anticipate those criticisms, noting that MicroSparc takes advantage of established quantum physics principles, clarifying that the technology does not violate basic physics principles.

“The underlying physics itself is not new,” White told The Debrief.

Instead, the former NASA scientist noted that the Casimir effect “has been part of established quantum mechanics since the mid-20th century and has been experimentally verified by laboratories around the world.” MicroSparc, he explained, is based on that science.

MicroSparc, White argues, builds on that established physics, although the company’s much more consequential claim—that its device can produce continuous usable electrical power from the quantum vacuum—has not been independently demonstrated.

“In our device, the quantum vacuum outside the cavity walls vigorously stimulates electrons in the wall atoms,” Dr. White previously told The Debrief. “Occasionally, an electron will quantum tunnel from the wall to one of the central pillars.”

For clarification, quantum tunneling is a well-established quantum phenomenon in which a particle has a finite probability of crossing an energy barrier that it could not overcome according to classical physics. The effect has been repeatedly demonstrated experimentally and underlies technologies ranging from scanning tunneling microscopes to semiconductor devices.

“Once inside the protected cavity, the environment is far quieter, (so) the probability of the electron tunneling back to the wall is orders of magnitude lower,” White told The Debrief.

White said this phenomenon creates a one-way flow of electrons toward the pillars, a process he compared to “a kind of quantum ratchet.” By fabricating millions of these microscopic cavities on a single chip, White said his team was able to produce “a continuous electrical current drawn from the quantum vacuum.”

Refining the Vacuum Energy Concept for a Fully Independent Generator

When discussing the significance of the award, especially given the controversial nature of vacuum energy concepts, the company told The Debrief that the award is “a signal to the market and community that this tech is pivotal and up-and-coming…now with gov’t resources.”

Dr. White agreed, noting that “This Phase I award is an important step in exploring how Casimir’s solid-state power technology could support national security missions where persistent, reliable power is essential.”

“As a producer of quantum energy technology, this project will allow the Casimir team to refine the concept for a fully independent generator while working with potential customers to better understand the requirements of systems operating in austere and difficult-to-service environments.”

Moving forward, the company told The Debrief that its goal remains targeting commercial availability of Casimir’s MicroSparc chip by 2028, “positioning the company to disrupt the ultra-low-power electronics sector.”

“The DAF began offering the Open Topic SBIR/STTR program in 2018, which expanded the range of innovations the DAF funded, and now, in August 2026, Casimir will continue its journey to create and provide innovative capabilities that will strengthen the national defense of the United States of America,” the company’s statement explained.

“Much of modern electronics is constrained by batteries, charging cycles, wiring, maintenance, or environmental limitations,” Dr. White told The Debrief. “If this technology scales successfully, its long-term implications could extend from ultra-low-power sensors and consumer electronics to remote infrastructure, defense systems, and eventually space applications, where persistent power is especially valuable.”

Although Phase I STTR awards are a necessary step toward larger Phase II and Phase III awards, which are designed to take emerging technologies proven in Phase I to the market, the company told The Debrief, “it’s way too soon” to realistically think about those steps, while acknowledging the possibility “down the line.”

Details on the technology are available on Casimir’s Website.

Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and has spent the last six years as Associate News Editor and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him at christopher@thedebrief.org.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced the successful test flight of a fully AI-controlled F-16 fighter aircraft that was specifically modified to serve as an anonymous flight testbed. The successful test comes just months after the same AI pilot software platform successfully piloted a one-of-a-kind X-62A VISTA aircraft in an aerial dogfight against an F-16.

DARPA officials said the successful flight of an aircraft category that is still in use for combat operations advances the state-of-the-art technological infrastructure needed to meet the challenges of a rapidly evolving aerial environment and will enable rapid, scalable combat AI pilot development across the broader U.S. military forces.

“These groundbreaking flight tests of VENOM-modified F-16s advance the infrastructure needed to develop trusted, autonomous air combat capabilities,” said Brig. Gen. James “Fangs” Valpiani, Ph.D., DARPA program manager.

AI-Controlled F-16 Test Flights Part of VENOM Program

According to a statement announcing the successful AI-controlled flights, the F-16 used in the tests was specifically converted to an AI testbed under the agency’s joint venture with the U.S. Air Force, the Viper Experimentation and Next-generation Operations Model (VENOM) program. The specific AI pilot installed in the F-16 is known as the VENOM Autonomy Kit, or VAK.

DARPA said VAK utilizes a “novel interface with the aircraft’s flight controls and mission systems.” This component allows an on-board human pilot to toggle between their traditional control systems and VAK “with the flip of a switch,” ensuring pilot safety during the testing phase where a human is still in the loop.

Valpiani said that the VENOM team installed the AI-controlled VAK interface, which successfully automated the F-16’s sensors and flight controls “without changing the jet’s core software.”

“This enables an efficient pipeline for developing dominant AI for aerial combat, allowing us to rapidly innovate for the warfighter,” the program manager explained.

Creating Dominant Autonomy Beyond Visual Range

When discussing the significance of the successful AI-controlled test flights, Valpiani once again highlighted the “emerging threat environment” in relation to aerial combat, including its increasing complexity.

“AI has tremendous potential to help humans manage this complexity in beyond-visual-range combat, but many hard questions remain concerning the performance and trustworthiness of combat AI in the extreme fog and friction of modern warfare,” explained the project leader, who was due to conclude his tenure as a DARPA program manager in the weeks after the announcement. “The AIR program aims to apply cutting-edge combat agents to operationally relevant scenarios to address these questions and field war-deterring, war-winning capabilities to our warfighters.”

Incoming program manager, Lt. Col. Patrick “Dice” Highland, Ph.D., highlighted the milestone’s role in “advancing our nation’s combat autonomy,” while also offering an eye toward the program’s future.

“We now have the opportunity to create dominant autonomy for beyond-visual-range, multi-ship combat,” Lt. Col Highland said. “These flights give us an early glimpse of how AI agents may begin actively transforming air warfare.”

Moving VAK’s Capabilities “Out of Simulation and Into the Sky”

Following the successful AI-piloted F-16 tests, the specially designed VENOM aircraft will join DARPA as it moves the entire venture under the umbrella of the agency’s Artificial Intelligence Reinforcements (AIR) program. According to the agency, this new program will use the aircraft in the VENOM fleet to “test multiple AI agents in live-flight scenarios.” If successful, DARPA said the program will “pave the way for human pilots to seamlessly command and orchestrate teams of autonomous, uncrewed aircraft.”

Current deputy program manager Terry Wilson, Ph.D., who will remain with the program, highlighted AIR’s longer-term goals of future joint force operations, including Collaborative Combat Aircraft programs. DARPA said that these efforts will focus on improving the speed and predictive ability of AI model development and “scale in-flight testing to multi-ship operations with increased complexity to unlock novel and robust AI-driven autonomy.”

“I share Gen. Valpiani’s deep appreciation for the incredible dedication of our DARPA and industry teammates, joint engineers, the System Program Office, Eglin’s test and maintenance crews, and the entire AIR and VENOM ecosystem which has made this milestone possible,” said Wilson. “I look forward to unleashing the VENOM platform and moving these capabilities out of simulation and into the sky.”

Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and has spent the last six years as Associate News Editor and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him at christopher@thedebrief.org

A spacecraft fitted with two flexible robotic arms is on the way to geosynchronous orbit after launching earlier this week on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, kicking off a planned decade-long mission to open new frontiers in satellite servicing.

The Mission Robotic Vehicle, owned and built by Northrop Grumman, rocketed into orbit from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Tuesday. Three small propulsion pods, each functioning as standalone spacecraft, accompanied the MRV aboard the Falcon 9 rocket.

The Falcon 9 deployed all four payloads within about an hour of liftoff. It will take about a year for the satellites to maneuver from their initial elliptical drop-off orbit into a circular orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator. At this altitude, the MRV and the three Mission Extension Pods (MEPs) will travel in lockstep with Earth's rotation, operating in the same kind of orbit as numerous civilian and military communications satellites, missile warning platforms, and a growing number of spy satellites.

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© US Navy/Sarah Peterson

A spacecraft fitted with two flexible robotic arms is on the way to geosynchronous orbit after launching earlier this week on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, kicking off a planned decade-long mission to open new frontiers in satellite servicing.

The Mission Robotic Vehicle, owned and built by Northrop Grumman, rocketed into orbit from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Tuesday. Three small propulsion pods, each functioning as standalone spacecraft, accompanied the MRV aboard the Falcon 9 rocket.

The Falcon 9 deployed all four payloads within about an hour of liftoff. It will take about a year for the satellites to maneuver from their initial elliptical drop-off orbit into a circular orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator. At this altitude, the MRV and the three Mission Extension Pods (MEPs) will travel in lockstep with Earth's rotation, operating in the same kind of orbit as numerous civilian and military communications satellites, missile warning platforms, and a growing number of spy satellites.

Read full article

Comments

© US Navy/Sarah Peterson

A spacecraft fitted with two flexible robotic arms is on the way to geosynchronous orbit after launching earlier this week on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, kicking off a planned decade-long mission to open new frontiers in satellite servicing.

The Mission Robotic Vehicle, owned and built by Northrop Grumman, rocketed into orbit from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Tuesday. Three small propulsion pods, each functioning as standalone spacecraft, accompanied the MRV aboard the Falcon 9 rocket.

The Falcon 9 deployed all four payloads within about an hour of liftoff. It will take about a year for the satellites to maneuver from their initial elliptical drop-off orbit into a circular orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator. At this altitude, the MRV and the three Mission Extension Pods (MEPs) will travel in lockstep with Earth's rotation, operating in the same kind of orbit as numerous civilian and military communications satellites, missile warning platforms, and a growing number of spy satellites.

Read full article

Comments

© US Navy/Sarah Peterson

The future of military artificial intelligence may not be a single all-knowing machine directing a battlefield from a distant command center. Instead, DARPA is preparing to explore enormous collectives of AI agents capable of organizing themselves, dividing up missions, adapting to chaos, and continuing to operate even when some members of the group fail, disappear, or go rogue.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has formally launched a new effort called Decentralized Artificial Intelligence by Controlled Emergence, or DICE, aimed at developing AI collectives that can operate in contested environments without requiring a human or central AI planner to explicitly direct every action.

By the program’s final phase, DARPA wants researchers to test simulated collectives involving as many as 100,000 AI agents exchanging up to 1 million messages as they work toward shared objectives.

A recently released solicitation notice describes DICE as a 36-month effort divided between decentralization, adversarial robustness, and large-scale testing.

“Future conflicts will unfold at machine speed, and the current centralized planning and scripted orchestration approach is too slow, too rigid, and too predictable for the hyper-dynamic, contested environments of the future,” researchers write. “Surprise, adaptability, and resilience will depend on the ability to compose and recompose AI capabilities on demand.”

The basic premise behind DARPA’s DICE program is that today’s approach to multi-agent AI has a serious weakness. Most systems involving multiple AI agents still rely on some form of central orchestrator.

Think of it as a manager overseeing a team of specialized employees. One AI agent might gather information. Another analyzes it. A third creates a plan. A fourth executes a particular task. But somewhere in the system, a central planner or workflow typically decides who does what and combines the results.

That works reasonably well for predictable tasks. However, DARPA argues it may be dangerously vulnerable on a battlefield.

A central orchestrator creates a bottleneck because every increasingly complex mission must ultimately flow through a single decision-making structure. As the number of agents, roles, and interactions grows, the central planner must absorb more information, preserve greater context, and coordinate an expanding web of specialized systems.

Eventually, DARPA says, even an AI orchestrator can hit the context and inference limits of its underlying foundation model. There is also a more obvious military problem. A central command node is a single point of failure.

If communications are degraded, information arrives late, or the orchestrator itself is compromised, errors can potentially spread throughout the entire AI collective.

In a future conflict where electronic warfare, cyberattacks, deception, and broken communications are expected rather than exceptional, that vulnerability could be catastrophic.

DICE proposes a radically different model.

Rather than having a central AI issue instructions, individual AI agents would communicate directly with one another. They could form temporary teams, divide missions into smaller tasks, negotiate roles, combine incomplete information, and reorganize themselves when conditions change.

DARPA compares the idea to the architecture of the internet, where resilient global behavior can emerge from relatively simple local rules and decentralized interactions.

Essentially, an AI agent might receive a mission and determine that only part of the objective falls within its capabilities. The agent could volunteer to handle that portion and broadcast the remaining problem to neighboring agents.

Another agent might take the next task. Others could compete to perform the same job, potentially bidding based on cost or capability. Through repeated local interactions along with distributed consensus, the collective could gradually assemble its own mission plan.

If an agent fails, the entire mission does not necessarily need to be replanned. Its particular task could simply be offered back to the collective.

DARPA calls the larger concept “controlled emergence.”

Similar systems already exist in nature. Ant colonies, or flocks of birds, can engage in surprisingly complex group behavior even though no individual member possesses a complete understanding of the collective.

Computer scientists have long studied similar phenomena. DARPA’s solicitation even points to Conway’s Game of Life, the famous mathematical simulation in which extraordinarily complex patterns can emerge from a handful of simple rules.

The challenge is applying that principle to cognitive systems capable of reasoning, planning, and independently pursuing goals.

A sophisticated AI system may interpret ambiguous information, interact with tools, maintain memory, and generate its own intermediate objectives. Put thousands of such agents together, allow them to communicate, and the resulting collective could behave in ways that were never explicitly programmed.

That unpredictability is both the attraction and the danger of DICE.

DARPA wants the collective to remain creative enough to discover unexpected courses of action. However, it also wants individual agents to continue aligned with their designated roles, the wider mission, established doctrine, and ultimately the human user’s intent.

Too much control could produce a predictable but unstable AI force incapable of adapting. Too little control could allow agents to drift from their roles or develop what DARPA calls “instrumental goals” that are not consistent with the mission.

In other words, the Pentagon’s research arm wants emergence—but only within boundaries.

To solve the problem, DICE researchers will develop a local adaptor designed to interface with each AI agent. Rather than functioning as a central command system, each adaptor would operate locally, helping the agent coordinate with peers while simultaneously monitoring and modifying its behavior.

For AI models whose internal activations are accessible, researchers may experiment with techniques such as “activation steering.”

The simplified idea is that assigning an AI a particular role can create detectable patterns inside the model. Researchers may be able to identify a mathematical representation associated with that role and continuously steer the model back toward it when the agent begins to drift. DARPA describes these representations as potential “role vectors.”

For proprietary or black-box AI models whose internal activations cannot be directly examined, the challenge becomes considerably harder. DICE researchers may instead experiment with memory editing, context engineering, tool restrictions, or even game-theoretic incentives created to encourage collaborative behavior.

The solicitation draws an intriguing comparison to the way social norms emerge and spread among humans. As AI models become better at reasoning and more aware of the context in which they operate, DARPA suggests that the same growing sophistication that fuels fears about rogue AI could also provide a new way to control it.

The scale DARPA ultimately envisions is enormous.

During the first nine-month phase of DICE, simulated missions are expected to involve approximately 500 agents and 5,000 interactions. DARPA will compare the decentralized systems with state-of-the-art centrally orchestrated multi-agent AI systems.

The second phase increases the target to 5,000 agents and 50,000 interactions while introducing adversarial conditions. Agents may fail, receive deceptive information, or deliberately behave as compromised or rogue members of the collective.

By the final 12-month phase, DICE aims to test simulations involving 100,000 agents and 1 million interactions.

At that scale, DARPA is not simply studying better chatbots working together. The agency is exploring whether collective intelligence itself can become a military capability.

One example described in the solicitation imagines AI agents conducting operational planning across an entire conflict ecosystem. Some agents could negotiate for raw materials in contested areas. Others might manage supply chains, optimize manufacturing, deploy units, conduct battle management, or analyze post-battle damage.

Even an individual simulated drone could effectively become a miniature AI collective composed of separate navigation, perception, and networking agents.

Under the DICE concept, those capabilities may potentially be recombined as conditions change. DARPA offers the example of a surveillance drone being repurposed as a network router because the collective recognizes an emerging communications need.

The important distinction is that no central planner necessarily has to foresee that solution. The collective discovers it.

Still, DARPA is careful to note that DICE is a research program centered on simulation. The agency’s public program page explicitly states that its scope does not include developing or launching autonomous systems in the real world.

Instead, DICE will use Department of War-relevant simulated environments to measure whether decentralized AI collectives can outperform today’s centrally orchestrated systems. Those simulations may resemble extraordinarily large and complicated strategy games.

DARPA suggests researchers could draw inspiration from StarCraft or massively multiplayer online role-playing games, although the environments must remain relevant to military problems. High-fidelity physics is not necessarily required. In fact, rendering every drone, vehicle, or battlefield interaction in photorealistic detail could make a simulation of 100,000 AI agents computationally impossible.

The focus is on reasoning. DARPA wants to know whether thousands of AI agents can gather and combine fragmented information without simply reinforcing one another’s incorrect assumptions. The systems will be tested on their ability to recognize deception, isolate compromised agents, adapt when communications fail, and remain focused on a mission across thousands of reasoning steps.

Perhaps most importantly, DICE is designed to examine how these massive AI collectives behave when their interactions yield outcomes their designers never anticipated.

DARPA explicitly wants its test environments to provoke emergent collaboration, competition, and even collusion.

During later phases, DICE teams will face one another in simulated “team vs team playoffs.” The second phase will culminate in a competition used to select which research teams advance. The final phase will feature another head-to-head competition after the systems have been pushed toward full scale.

By Phase 3, the program will bring in another significant complication: AI agents creating other AI agents. That progression draws attention to the deeper tension at the center of DICE.

For years, much of the AI safety debate has focused on preventing autonomous systems from exhibiting unforeseen behavior. DARPA is approaching the problem from a different direction. The agency appears to believe that, in future contested environments, some degree of unforeseen behavior may be precisely what gives an AI collective its value.

A perfectly scripted system is predictable not only to its commanders but potentially to an adversary.

DICE is therefore attempting something considerably more ambitious than building a larger multi-agent AI framework. DARPA wants to understand whether engineers can deliberately cultivate emergent machine intelligence, allow it enough freedom to improvise, and still build controls capable of keeping an enormous AI collective aligned with a human-defined mission.

Whether those competing demands can coexist remains an open question. The program’s own solicitation repeatedly acknowledges the possibility of role drift, deceptive agents, collusion, compromised systems, and AI agents independently developing misaligned actions.

Ultimately, those are not side issues. They are the fundamental questions the DICE program was created to answer.

“DICE is built for such autonomy-powered, high-tempo battlespace,” the solicitation notice reads. “It is a future where success is measured by the relentless, creative ability of an autonomous collective to execute missions in the face of chaos and uncertainty. This is a profound and necessary departure from the past.”

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com