Code Metal has been awarded an $80 million Other Transaction Authority (OTA) contract with the U.S. Department of War (DoW) to modernize its modeling and simulation ecosystem with what the company describes as provable AI.
The contract will support Code Metal’s work on WarMatrix, an AI-enabled modeling and simulation platform developed in partnership with the U.S. Air Force. The system is designed to integrate AI capabilities with established military simulation environments, including the Advanced Framework for Simulation, Integration, and Modeling (AFSIM), without requiring those systems to be replaced.
The award comes as defense organizations seek to apply AI to operational planning and analysis while maintaining confidence in software and models that have undergone years of testing and validation. Code Metal said its technology is designed to mathematically verify that transformed code maintains the same behavior as the original, allowing AI capabilities to be introduced without invalidating existing validation.
Under the contract, WarMatrix will support warfighters in developing, evaluating, and adapting courses of action in hours rather than months, according to Code Metal. Potential applications include operational planning, education, force design, mission engineering, and campaign analysis.
The approach is aimed at addressing a longstanding challenge in military technology modernization. Defense modeling and simulation environments have accumulated decades of development, testing, and operational validation, representing significant investments in software and infrastructure. Replacing those systems can require extensive re-engineering and a new cycle of validation before they can be trusted for mission-critical use.
Code Metal said its technology is intended to enable modernization around those existing systems rather than requiring the Department to rebuild its modeling infrastructure from the ground up.
“Code Metal is proud to support the Department of War’s efforts to modernize and accelerate some of the most sophisticated modeling and simulation environments in the world,” said Peter Morales, co-founder and CEO of Code Metal. He said the objective is to make existing systems more adaptable and AI-ready while retaining the characteristics that make them trusted.
WarMatrix is intended to reduce the technical complexity involved in combining AI, models, and simulations. Code Metal said planners will be able to work with those capabilities without needing to be software engineers, while maintaining human judgment in the decision-making process.
The contract also extends Code Metal’s broader strategy of applying AI to established software environments across mission-critical industries. The company said its customers include the U.S. Air Force, RTX (NYSE: RTX), Toshiba, and L3Harris Technologies (NYSE: LHX), with deployments spanning defense, aerospace, automotive, semiconductor, and communications applications.
Laura Shen, executive vice president of growth at Code Metal, said the company’s work focuses on modernizing validated software while preserving confidence in systems used for critical decisions.
The WarMatrix contract highlights a broader shift in defense technology toward integrating AI with existing infrastructure rather than pursuing wholesale replacement. For military organizations, the challenge is increasingly how to introduce faster computational and analytical capabilities without compromising the validation, reliability, and institutional knowledge embedded in legacy systems.
Code Metal’s $80 million award puts that approach at the center of a major U.S. defense modeling and simulation program, with the company expected to apply its verification technology to systems already embedded in the Department’s operational analysis and wargaming ecosystem.
