WASHINGTON — The Pentagon plans to jumpstart a new generation of public-private partnerships by making much of its high-tech research readily available to industry through a new AI-augmented database, with an “alpha” version going online by the end of the year, the official leading the effort told Breaking Defense.
Currently, a federally funded non-profit called TechLink hosts an online database with patents and other data for over 5,400 technologies from DoD labs, with over 500 new ones added every year. Anyone can search the database and follow up with TechLink’s on-staff experts for free. TechLink estimates that it’s helped companies create over 45,000 jobs and $5 billion in revenues since 2000. But the number of patents is so large, and their content is so abstruse, that non-experts often struggle to find what they’re looking for, both DoD and TechLink officials told Breaking Defense.
To fix that, TechLink Associate Director Austin Leach told Breaking Defense, “we are in a project right now, actually, working with some vendors to rethink the search process on our website, pulling in AI tools.”
As a way to help get vendors on the platform, Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Emil Michael declared a “patent holiday” on hundreds of carefully picked patents from Defense Department labs, allowing industry to use the tech for two years without paying the usual fees. But Michael himself made clear to reporters this “freebie” was just “the door-buster” to build interest in the thousands of patents, plus related data, that will be in the comprehensive database.
In an interview with Breaking Defense, Stephen Luckowski, the Pentagon’s director of Technology Transfer, Transition, & Commercial Partnerships (T3CP), provided new details on what intellectual property the upgraded version of TechLink will contain, when it will go online, and how new AI search and analysis tools should make it vastly more accessible to outsiders than the current system.
“By the end of March, we anticipate having all the guidance … and the updates to DODGARS, the DoD grants and agreements regulation,” Luckowski, the point person on the patent project, said. Meanwhile, with the help of the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Officer (CDAO), he said, “we’re working on an alpha [database] adding some of these AI tools,” which should be “functional” by the end of the calendar year.
The overall goal of all these upgrades is a new wave of win-win deals between the private sector and the Pentagon, Luckowski said. Industry will get better access to taxpayer-funded R&D it can turn into products and sell to the commercial market, the military, or both. (The ideal is what’s called a “dual-use” product, like a StarLink terminal that could be used to run a business or a flock of attack drones). The military, in turn, gets more companies building technology that it might not be able to produce affordably or at scale on its own.
“Oftentimes, we build fragile supply chains we’re the only customer for,” Luckowski told Breaking Defense. “Ideally, we would want to have commercial partners so we have resilient supply chains,” he said, which can get higher volume, lower cost, and efficiencies of scale because they’re funded not just by government contracts but by a robust commercial market.
“You can’t do that for everything. Some things are going to be very military-specific,” Luckowski acknowledged. But, he said, there are many areas — “I look at advanced materials, I look at microelectronics, I look at biotech”— where dual-use applications abound and private investment can carry start-up and overhead costs instead of the taxpayer.
Show Me The Data
The private sector can’t invest in tech it doesn’t even know exists. That knowledge gap is what the new database system is meant to overcome.
Patents are public record and the Patent Office has been publishing them for over 150 years. But these patents aren’t always easy to find or understand.
TechLink’s current system is basically a keyword search, said Leach: The precise technical terms can lead to the patents with those same terms. But that doesn’t find relevant patents that use different terminology, he said, let alone say how those patents might be turned into viable commercial products.
The goal is to move from today’s Google-style search interface to a chatbot-like conversation with a specially trained GenAI, Luckowski and Leach explained. Instead of just trying to match specific keywords, the user could upload unstructured, plain-English descriptions of what kinds of products and technologies they were interested in. The AI could respond with equally plain-English descriptions of relevant patents, plus contact information for the labs behind them.
Limited patent-analysis AIs are already available, Luckowski said, and his staff used some of them to help identify the 400 patents for the patent holiday. These programs can even output a “commercialization score” that rates a given patent’s chances of turning into a viable commercial product, he said. But he wants to train more powerful and specialized AIs on much larger amounts of defense-specific data.
Besides the patents, the new database will also include “invention reporting” — the step-by-step documentation many researchers produce over multiple years as they build their case for a subsequent patent application. Today this reporting is kept within the Defense Department, so it’s not available through TechLink. Luckowski plans to add it to the alpha version of the database going online later this year, which would let users find technologies that haven’t even been published as a patent yet.
Finally, Luckowski said, the alpha database won’t just include patent data and invention reporting from DoD’s own labs — the “intramural” R&D — but also from universities and companies doing DoD-funded research —“extramural” R&D — in which the Department retains government purpose rights. Today, while lab patents are available online via TechLink, the extramural patents are collected by the Commerce Department’s iEDISON system, which historically is only accessible by government agencies, not the public or private industry.
“The catalog of intellectual property at external research at universities is even more vast than the laboratories,” Luckowski said. “Since we don’t have the iEDISON [datalink] up and running, yet, I don’t know the number, but I would guess that it’s 10 to 20,000 patents.”