Red Hat and the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory collaborate to advance open API research

Artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing at a rapid pace and has revealed the need for standardized, open application platform interfaces (APIs) across both public and private sectors. Public sector and private sector research, innovation and collaboration are crucial to the development of AI in the United States.

As a part of Red Hat's mission to bring AI into the open source world, we're excited to announce a collaboration with the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) Army Research Laboratory (ARL) via a recently signed Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA). Under this collaboration, joint research teams will aim to develop open source APIs that align with the principles of Traceability, Observability, Orchestration, Replaceability and automated Consumption (TORC) for AI operations in support of U.S. Army projects including Project Linchpin. Project Linchpin is an effort to apply AI/ML concepts and technologies for innovation around Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors (IEW&S); a key component of the project is the focus upon open APIs, which will be used to address a number of key pain points, such as, avoiding vendor lock in and instead ensuring open standards to support multi vendor AI solutions and allowing organizations maintain the ability to leverage large language models across silos.

This CRADA was established with Red Hat as a result of the company’s recent Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) award win. This consulting engagement was successfully completed in March 2024. This work enables the management of configurations and automated deployments of applications, driving modularity and flexibility to ensure seamless component replacement within the AI and machine learning (ML) pipeline.

Overcoming barriers with Red Hat open source APIs

Implementing and managing API integrations can be challenging. Currently, federal agencies and organizations are challenged by predominantly proprietary AI platforms which lock organizations into rigid workflows and make it difficult to adapt to the rapidly-evolving AI landscape. Red Hat and the U.S. Army’s joint mission aims to address these challenges and enhance the security of these operations via the TORC framework.

Red Hat's API solutions are built with open source communities in mind and focus on reusability, IT agility and a management interface for monitoring, scaling and measuring. By reducing the skills gap, developers are able to build in integrated environments without needing to know every individual component, allowing for greater efficiency and flexibility. Red Hat and U.S. Army research teams intend to leverage industry standards, well-defined processes, and measurable evaluation criteria to bring forth solutions that allow organizations to maintain greater control over AI systems.