Strider Uses Agentic AI to Help the US Air Force and NATO Identify Foreign State Actors
The most interesting AI startup almost nobody is talking about is based in Salt Lake City. Strider Technologies, profiled by Bloomberg today, uses agentic AI agents and public records data to identify foreign state actors operating inside US and allied institutions. Its customers reportedly include the US Air Force, NATO partners, and several Fortune 500 companies, and the company is riding the wave of the Trump administration's accelerated China-focused intelligence push.
What Strider Actually Does
The product is, at its simplest, an AI-driven search and pattern-matching layer over the world's open and semi-open data. Researchers and analysts feed it a target — a person, a company, a research institution — and Strider's agents scour public records, scientific publications, corporate filings, and other open sources to map relationships, conflicts of interest, foreign affiliations, and historical activity.
What makes it agentic, rather than just a database query, is the iterative reasoning. The agents pivot from finding to interpreting: spotting that a researcher's listed Chinese institutional affiliation matches an entity flagged by US sanctions, or that a corporate director sits simultaneously on multiple boards with overlapping geopolitical exposures. The investigator gets a structured report rather than a stack of search results.
Why the US Air Force and NATO Are Customers
Defence and intelligence customers have been desperate for tools that bridge the gap between massive open-source data and the small number of human analysts who can read it. Strider sits exactly in that gap. Bloomberg reports that the company's agents have already supported counter-intelligence work that previously took weeks of manual research, and US Air Force and NATO partners are using the platform for screening tech transfer risks, vendor due diligence, and detecting foreign-affiliated researchers in sensitive programs.
The political backdrop matters. President Trump's second-term policy stance has put aggressive emphasis on identifying and rolling back Chinese influence inside US research institutions and corporate supply chains. Strider's product fit that policy moment perfectly. Government contracts now make up a meaningful share of revenue, with corporate clients adding security and compliance use cases.
The Bigger Pattern: Defence-Tech Crossover With Agentic AI
Strider is part of a wider boom in defence and intelligence-focused AI startups. Palantir, Anduril, Scale AI's federal arm, and now Strider are all pushing into spaces traditionally owned by lumbering primes — and joining a wave of commercial surveillance and intelligence platforms reshaping how governments do open-source intelligence like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. The defence procurement system is finally — slowly — letting in the kinds of fast-moving software companies that have dominated commercial AI.
This is also where the broader global AI arms race meets specific operational tooling. Autonomous weapons get headlines, but quiet products like Strider — agentic intelligence at scale — are arguably more impactful in day-to-day defence work.
My Take
Honestly, this is exactly the kind of agentic AI use case that is going to dominate enterprise spending for the next five years. Strider does one thing — open-source intelligence — extremely well, with an obvious customer base willing to pay six and seven figure annual contracts. That is a much better business than yet another general-purpose chatbot — and it sits in the same agentic AI defense category as Anthropic's Project Glasswing coalition.
The smart concern is dual-use. Tools that map foreign affiliations are powerful for legitimate counter-intelligence and equally powerful as a weapon against academic researchers, immigrants, and dissidents who happen to have inconvenient overseas connections. If Strider does not invest hard in red-teaming its own use cases, this becomes a civil liberties story very quickly.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Strider Technologies?
Strider Technologies is a Salt Lake City-based AI intelligence startup that uses agentic AI and open-source data to identify foreign state actors, foreign-affiliated researchers, and supply chain risks. Its customers include the US Air Force, NATO partners, and Fortune 500 companies.
What does "agentic AI" mean in Strider's product?
Agentic AI describes models that pursue tasks across multiple steps using tools — searching, retrieving, comparing, and reasoning iteratively rather than answering a single query. Strider's agents iteratively map relationships and affiliations across millions of public records.
Is Strider working with the US government?
Yes. Bloomberg's reporting confirms that the US Air Force and several NATO partners are Strider customers, alongside Fortune 500 corporates using the platform for vendor screening, security, and compliance.
How does Strider relate to the China crackdown?
The Trump administration's intensified focus on Chinese influence inside US research and corporate institutions has accelerated demand for Strider-style tools. The company's open-source intelligence platform fits directly into that policy environment, though its use cases extend beyond a single geopolitical concern.
The Bottom Line
Strider is a textbook example of how agentic AI is going to win enterprise — by picking a focused, hard, valuable problem and solving it better than humans plus traditional software ever could. Defence and intelligence are early markets, but the same product architecture extends naturally into compliance, due diligence, and corporate security. Whether you find this exciting or unnerving, this is what real AI deployment looks like in 2026, and there will be a lot more of it.