Data², a startup founded by retired U.S. military vets, just landed a patent for tech aimed at making AI explainable and resistant to hallucinations.
The patent, issued Tuesday by the USPTO, targets reliability issues in AI for high-stakes fields like defense, intelligence, and national security. The company’s CEO Jon Brewton, a former airman, says their tech lets organizations trust AI outputs for mission-critical decisions.
“These are organizations that, at the end of the day, have a low tolerance for failure, especially in the defense and in the intel space. Wrong answers have real consequences,” Brewton said.
“But what this means is they can finally build and deploy AI that they can trust and use to make mission-critical decisions. And I think that’s a real differentiator, because we’re not talking about just generic chatbot features. What we’re really talking about is building systems that are getting more reliable and have a systematic process for creating trustworthy outputs.”
Founded by Brewton alongside retired Navy SEAL Chris Rohrbach, Marine Eric Costantini, and tech veteran Jeff Dalgliesh, Data² leaned heavily on their military and intelligence backgrounds. They worked through accelerator programs with the Air Force and Space Force and built early proof of concepts for the intel community.
The secret? A “knowledge graph” system that anchors AI responses in verifiable, traceable source data with citations down to the record level. It works across any AI model or ecosystem.
“Ultimately, what we found out very, very early on in the process, which informed the patent that we developed, is that better data architecture, better data structure, is really the key to unlock how you can grow in explainability, traceability and transparency — not better models,” Brewton said.
Data² aims to scale through partnerships with tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Dell, and Nvidia to deliver AI they say governments can finally trust — in the cloud or on air-gapped edge kits.
“It’s not limited to a data architecture, it’s not limited to a data type, it’s not limited to a large language model, it’s not limited to an environment,” Brewton added.
“We’ve tested fully cloud-hosted environments, all the way down to a completely air-gapped deployed edge kit.”
The patent underscores Data²’s push to make AI usable in highly regulated, mission-critical sectors — starting with defense and intelligence.
“Our patent really represents sort of a first step towards making AI usable by governments and other highly regulated organizations,” Brewton said.
