ONR launching ‘research by AI’ initiative as it looks to speed the delivery of cutting-edge tech to the fleet

The Office of Naval Research plans to lean more heavily into artificial intelligence as a tool that can help the office perform its work, according to the organization’s new science-and-technology strategy.

The Navy and Marine Corps research arm’s investment portfolio is wide-ranging and encompasses innovations at various technology readiness levels, including TRL 1-7. Its focus areas include AI and autonomy; C5ISR and naval space; directed energy and kinetic systems; materials and electronics; human and biological systems; manufacturing; naval engineering; naval aerospace; ocean, atmosphere and space; power and energy; and undersea systems.

“Strategy, and especially strategy in innovation organizations, requires placing informed bets — and sometimes big ones. Resource allocation is much of what we do. Therefore, ensuring that we are allocating our portfolios to the highest and best uses at any given time (and adjusting as new data emerges) is the core of what we must do well to accomplish our mission,” Chief of Naval Research Dr. Rachel Riley wrote in an introductory letter to the new S&T strategy that was released Wednesday.

“In this important moment in time, we have embarked on a journey to refine how we do every part of our business, to make transparent what we are solving for, what bets we will place across our portfolio, and how we will measure whether and how they have paid off,” she added.

AI and autonomy are at the top of the list of ONR’s focus areas, including research on machine learning; adversarial AI and autonomy; intelligent and collaborative agents; perception and understanding; autonomous systems control; and modeling, simulation, testing, verification and validation, according to the S&T strategy.

Now, the organization is planning to enhance the integration of artificial intelligence into its actual workflows, via a new “research by AI” approach.

“ONR will begin a strategic initiative to not only research AI for naval use cases but also use AI to conduct basic and applied research. The goal is to achieve machine-driven acceleration in research to outpace adversaries in the discovery, invention and fielding of new technology. ONR will use AI to compress combinatorial search problems to accelerate scientific research and will search for new forms of accelerated research, such as AI hypothesis-driven research or other methods, yet to be discovered,” officials wrote in the strategy.

The initiative comes as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao are pushing for the adoption of AI tools across the department, not only for warfighting but also for back-office functions.

The tech is expected to serve as an aide to program officers.

“ONR will invest in training and deploying specialized AI assistant tools to help POs stay current with fast-changing technology, identify new research and non-traditional performers, synthesize researchers’ results, and automate routine administrative tasks,” officials wrote in the new S&T strategy.

“Additionally, ONR will focus on educating POs on how researchers are increasingly applying AI within their own scientific workflows. By leveraging AI for data informed portfolio analysis, a single PO will dramatically enhance scientific productivity. The goal is not to replace humans, but to increase our efforts exponentially by having large-scale networks of coordinated performers and agents to achieve asymmetric effects in problem solving and time,” the document noted.

ONR also envisions using the technology to boost testing validation and quality assurance.

“The speed-up gained from AI-generated research addresses only part of the opportunity and challenge. We will also explore how AI-produced hypotheses, results and designs will be validated — whether by human review, experimental confirmation or independent AI critique,” officials wrote.

Independent AI critique “introduces another part of the initiative, where AI can be used to validate, red-team and quality-check not only results from AI performers, but also from human performers,” they noted, adding that ONR will develop “governance and human oversight frameworks with defined ethical and security guardrails.”