Exclusive: Applied Intuition unveils programs to power autonomous drone swarms

The latest: Applied's announcement Tuesday includes its Axion and Acuity product lines.

• The former is a "developer cloud" made "specifically for the development of military-grade autonomy," Jason Brown, the company's general manager for defense, told Axios.
• The latter, he said, "is the output of that."
• Think of one as the brain and the other as the textbook from which it learns.

Together, they hope to account for the "hyper-dynamic realities of warfighting," said Brown, "and of the operating environments that our warfighters find themselves."

• Programming autonomous weapons and machines to work on war-torn landscapes and on fast-changing battlefields is a huge challenge for militaries and their contractors. Speedy updates are a necessity.

Zoom in: The newly disclosed software has been used across the services, including aboard the X-62A VISTA, a modified F-16.

Context: Applied in December acquired EpiSci, which was involved with the VISTA and its dogfighting trials.

The bottom line: "Live testing simply can't keep pace with the modern battlefield," Peter Ludwig, Applied's chief technology officer, told Axios.

• "Digital-first development and integration are essential to scaling unmanned systems."

Go deeper: The Pentagon's software-hardware tug of war