Overview
- The U.S. Navy picked Domino Data Lab for a contract worth up to $99.7 million to expand Project AMMO, its push to power mine-hunting with machine learning.
- Domino’s platform pulls in side-scan sonar and visual imagery, tracks how detection models perform at sea, flags failures, and pushes fixes to underwater drones.
- Domino says model updates that once took as long as six months now take days, and it says units trained in one region could be retuned for another in about a week.
- The focus is the Strait of Hormuz, a vital oil route where U.S.-Iran tensions raised the risk to shipping, and clearing remaining mines could still take months.
- Mine-hunting is shifting from ship crews to AI-guided underwater vehicles, a change meant to cut risk to sailors even as large-scale clearance stays slow and complex.