Donovan

Donovan is Scale AI ’s federal decision platform, launched in 2023 as what the company described as the first large-language-model deployment onto a US government classified network. It first went to work with the US Army’s XVIII Airborne Corps. Rather than process sensor or video feeds, Donovan ingests the written substance of a campaign — thousands of operational orders, situation reports, and intelligence products — and lets analysts and planners query that corpus in plain language, surfacing answers and drafting proposed courses of action in minutes rather than days.

The platform leans on retrieval-augmented generation to keep its answers grounded in the underlying documents, and adds capabilities such as geospatial chat, document translation that preserves operational meaning, and integration with command-and-control workflows. In late 2024 Scale added Defense Llama, a national-security-tuned version of Meta’s Llama 3, available exclusively inside Donovan’s controlled environments. Scale has cited adoption across the XVIII Airborne Corps, the Marine Corps University, and the Defense Logistics Agency.

Donovan competes in the same decision-advantage space as Palantir ’s Maven Smart System and Artificial Intelligence Platform, and Anduril ’s Lattice, but from a text-and-language angle: where Maven is built around fusing imagery and motion video into a targeting picture, Donovan is built around making the documentary record of an operation searchable and actionable.