Booz Allen Hamilton, Red Hat awarded contract for Project Linchpin

Booz Allen Hamilton and Red Hat have been awarded a contract to work on Project Linchpin -- the Army's initiative to create a pipeline for artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The $2 million contract, announced Wednesday, is the first of several awards that will support the program, according to the service.

The contract will support the principles of traceability, observability, replaceability and consumability (TORC), which is the framework to “ensure model and data integrity, data openness and modular open system architecture design,” according to the Army. It has a six-month period of performance, with option years of up to five years.

Since the Army began releasing requests for information on Project Linchpin in late 2022, there have been more than 170 engagements with industry, officials previously told Inside Defense. The Army plans to use other transaction authorities over the next 18 months in its contracting approach for Linchpin, project lead Bharat Patel said at an Aug. 29 National Defense Industrial Association event.

Col. Chris Anderson, project manager for intelligence systems and analytics within the Program Executive Office for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors (PEO IEW&S), said in a statement Wednesday that the contract is “a significant first step to decouple AI from software, decompose components within a [machine learning operations] pipeline, and wrap layers of security around the entire process.”

“These design principles will allow the Army to leverage the best-of-breed technology available across industry, academia, and government,” he said.