A read on the partnership shape for defense-vertical expansion. Research-forward AI meets veteran-owned federal plumbing.
AE Studio is at eMerge Americas in the defense pavilion. The alignment research arm keeps publishing; the commercial build practice keeps shipping. The defense move has a real plumbing prerequisite: FedRAMP, CMMC, SAM registration, clearance-eligible staffing, ICM methodology that survives a federal review. This page is a short read on the partnership shape, and the first conversation we would like to have.
Defense-vertical entry is a plumbing problem before it is a product problem.
We work on a simple idea. About 60% of what a research-forward consultancy ships into the defense vertical is traditional code and database work, scaffolded by federal-vendor compliance infrastructure. About 30% is rule-based logic. Around 10% is a genuine AI or alignment problem. The job is sorting those three into the right layers before anything is built, and attaching a veteran-owned SAM-registered partner to the infrastructure layer so the alignment and ML work compounds.
Applied to AE Studio's defense move, the map resolves quickly. CAGE and SAM registration, facility clearances, CMMC path, FedRAMP-adjacent hosting choices, and contractor-friendly contract vehicles are the infrastructure layer. Workflow compliance gates and federal-customer communication rules are the logic layer. Alignment research and ML build execution are the AE core. The partnership shape is the first three sitting with Eduba and the last one staying with AE, with ICM methodology on both sides.
That is the work we would propose to scope with the AE Studio leadership team and the practice leads in a first conversation.
A small team responsible for a fast-moving product and a senior leader who wanted a methodology the team could keep running after we left. The sprint delivered a workshop, advisory calls, an Organizational Context Architecture, and a Strategic Operations Framework. The relevance to AE Studio is structural: methodology transfer between two research-and-build teams, with the documentation surviving beyond the engagement.
- Organizational Context Architecture Alignment-research-to-commercial-build context bridge
- Strategic Operations Framework Defense-vertical partnership playbook, jointly maintained
- Advisory calls through first cycle Through the first SBIR or dual-use federal engagement
The methodology is published.
Ethics Engine (arXiv:2510.11742) is a psychometric assessment tool for evaluating ideological and moral patterns in LLMs. Direct intellectual overlap with AE Studio's alignment research agenda. The companion Interpretable Context Methodology paper (ACM TiiS submitted) is the operational wrapper that lets alignment research sit on top of a commercial or federal engagement.
arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2510.11742
ICM repo: github.com/RinDig/Interpretable-Context-Methodology-ICM-
Who is on the other side of the table.
- 01Jake Van Clief, founder. Marine Corps veteran, eight years, cryptographic systems and F-35/F-18 avionics. MSc Future Governance, University of Edinburgh.
- 02Published in ACM TiiS (ICM) and arXiv (Ethics Engine, a psychometric assessment tool for ideological and moral patterns in LLMs).
- 031,500 plus enterprise learners trained since May 2025 across Correlation One (Pacific Life, Colgate-Palmolive) and KPMG UK, one of the Big Four.
- 04Jake also built an online community to 22,000 members in five weeks.
- 05Eduba partners with NLP Logix for work that sits below the orchestration layer. NLP Logix has been in machine learning since 2011 and runs over 150 data scientists.
Thirty minutes with Matt Van Clief.
Bring the first defense-vertical experiment and the plumbing gap you have already noticed. We will walk through the 60 / 30 / 10 map live, draw the partnership boundary where it actually belongs, and scope a first joint engagement (or a methodology exchange) from there.
If the conversation lands somewhere else, we will say so on the call.