Posted on December 10, 2025
The Navy’s four public shipyards and two unidentified private shipyards are working with Palantir for a program the service is calling “Ship OS” as part of a new $448 million effort to improve efficiency through better use of data.
Announced at an industry day on Tuesday, the Shipbuilding Operating System program, or Ship OS, will collect data from across the new construction and maintenance systems to streamline shipbuilding and the repair of the current fleet, according to the service.
“Every ship builder who partners with us will have AI power tools that optimize their work in real time. Every supplier in the network will be connected through intelligent logistics,” Secretary of the Navy John Phelan said on stage with Palantir CEO Alex Karp. “Every program manager will have unprecedented visibility into schedule, cost and risk. We’re not just building ships faster. We’re rebuilding American maritime industrial capacity for the AI age.”
The Ship OS program will be managed through the Maritime Industrial Base program and Naval Sea Systems Command, with an initial focus on the submarine industrial base and critical suppliers as part of a two-year initial contract to use the service The Navy said in a statement that the pilot programs using AI have seen benefits for the service.
“At General Dynamics Electric Boat, submarine schedule planning was reduced from 160 manual hours to under 10 minutes, while Portsmouth Naval Shipyard cut material review times from weeks to under one hour,” reads the statement from the service. “These early outcomes demonstrate that integrating AI and autonomy directly into shipbuilding operations can dramatically improve efficiency, accuracy, and output.”
Palantir will work with the public yards and the two unknown private yards to better understand their own data and find ways to work more efficiently, Navy officials told reporters on Tuesday.
“They are in the shipyards, rolling up their sleeves, understanding what data we have, and it’s in all different forms and all different systems, and identifying what is driving performance and where the big bets and… choke points that we need to get after,” acting Assistant Secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition (RDA) Jason Potter told reporters on Tuesday.
The funding for the Ship OS effort came from the Reconciliation Act, according to the service.
In July, Palantir and BlueForge Alliance were testing a similar system called “Warp Speed for Warships” that would tie in legacy data systems from across the Navy and industry to form a better understanding of the logistics supply chains for new ship construction.
Over the summer, former BFA president Kiley Wren told USNI News that BFA had been partnered with Palantir for almost two years to gear up for the Warp Speed for Warships initiative. That partnership, Wren said at the time, had BFA and Palantir focused on working with the two major submarine builders – General Dynamics Electric Boat and HII’s Newport News – and suppliers in a pilot program.
Palantir, named for a magical item from The Lord of the Rings used to communicate across vast distances, is perhaps best known in the Pentagon for its Project Maven software tools that have been used by U.S. forces for targeting information and as a planning tool.
The Navy’s announcement about its partnership with Palantir comes the same day that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth unveiled the Pentagon’s own AI tool, GenAI.mil.
