The company that lost the FAA’s SMART contract still got an order with its name

On 23 June 2026 the Federal Aviation Administration awarded Air Space Intelligence (ASI), a Boston company, the contract to modernise how the United States manages air traffic. The federal register of public contracts — the procurement equivalent of an SEC filing — records a ceiling of $875,950,000 over twelve years, awarded after full and open competition with 12 offers received. The losers were Palantir Technologies and Thales, two names far larger than ASI. On 13 August 2026 — fifteen days before today — the same FAA office that ran the award recorded a second act: a $500,000, non-competed order to Palantir. The official description opens with the same word as the contract it had lost: SMART.

An award won with twelve offers

The programme covers two systems. FMDS (Flow Management Data and Services) replaces the FAA’s current traffic-flow management; SMART runs as a capability inside it and flags congestion before aircraft leave the ground. The public register (PIID 693KA726C00064, office 693KA7 ENROUTE & TERMINAL CONTRACTS) codes the procedure as FULL AND OPEN COMPETITION AFTER EXCLUSION OF SOURCES, with solicitation procedure ALTERNATIVE SOURCES: full and open competition, but after some sources were excluded — not the category without exclusions, which in the federal scheme is a different one. The first obligation on record is $11,484,250; the ceiling with all options is the figure quoted above — numbers anyone can verify for themselves, not figures from a press release.

What ASI and the FAA state

On 22 June ASI distributed its own release via PR Newswire. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford is quoted there: “FMDS and SMART will give controllers modern, data-driven tools to better anticipate demand, balance capacity, and manage traffic before delays occur.” ASI’s President of Civil Aviation, Bernard Asare, states: “We have invested nearly $100 million of our own resources to develop a platform that is operational today.” A figure only ASI knows: a private company, no accounts filed with the SEC.

The same applies to another number, cited more by the press than by ASI itself: Flyways is said to serve over 40% of US air traffic. The trade site DroneXL isolates it this way: “That 40 percent figure is ASI’s own marketing number, and it deserves a closer look than the headlines gave it” — being available to dispatchers at three carriers is not the same as routing four flights in ten across the country.

On 13 August, an order with the same name

The same office, 693KA7, that awarded the contract to ASI, records on 13 August the PIID 693KA726P00024: type PURCHASE ORDER, $500,000, description SMART - PALANTIR PURCHASE ORDER. The period of performance runs from 13 to 14 August: one day. The competition field reads NOT COMPETED UNDER SAP, one offer received, procedure SAP NON-COMPETITION (FAR 13) — a simplified, uncompeted acquisition. It is not attached to any umbrella contract: the field for that instrument is blank.

This is not the normal shape of the FAA-Palantir relationship. In the same period another office at the same agency — 692M15 ACQUISITION & GRANTS — records an order to Palantir of $9,483,339.79 for unrelated systems, described PALANTIR FOR ASKME/ASPIRE/ADO, under a GSA schedule. Thales, the other loser, appears in the same window only on orders tied to its own ground systems — instrument landing signals, spare parts, a contract option — and on none carrying the name SMART.

We do not know what the order is for. No Palantir statement mentions it; no outlet we checked reports it; the description field says nothing beyond the label. It could be transition support, data interoperability between the old system and ASI’s, or something else: the register does not say. We report it as we found it — a documented fact whose reason stays open.

Filed, stated, reported by others

Three categories, not to be confused. Filed: the two records in the federal USASpending/FPDS register, with structured fields — amounts, dates, competition codes — verifiable by anyone at the addresses below. Stated: Bedford’s and Asare’s words in ASI’s release, including the figures only ASI can know, because it is private. Reported by others: DroneXL’s critical read on the 40% figure, and The Motley Fool’s 25 August summary — “Palantir just lost a massive $875 million FAA artificial intelligence contract to a much smaller competitor” — reliable sources, but one step removed from the underlying document.

The distinction also touches Palantir, which is listed and does file with the SEC. Since 2020 it has used Item 1.01 — the 8-K caption for a material definitive agreement — exactly three times: 2 April 2021, 1 April 2022, 1 July 2022, always paired with Item 2.03 (creation of a financial obligation), always for amendments to its credit agreement of 7 October 2014, for which Wells Fargo is administrative agent. Since then — over four years, through the enterprise agreement with the US Army, ImmigrationOS with ICE, the SMART competition, and now this order — it has not filed another Item 1.01: in its history, that caption is reserved for bank agreements alone.

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What we do not know

We do not know why the FAA issued the 13 August order, or whether similar ones will follow: we checked through 28 August, and USASpending can lag by several days. We do not know whether Palantir or Thales filed a protest against the award to ASI: the sources we checked report none, and a search of GAO’s protest docket returned a 403 at the time of verification — we do not treat that as proof of absence. We do not know how an AI routing system will be certified for safety before it runs inside national airspace: DroneXL flags this as missing from the announcement itself, not a fact we verified. We do not know, finally, whether the figures ASI states would hold up to an independent audit: no one can, because it is private.

The question for the buyer

Anyone buying a critical system — air traffic, but the lesson holds for any mission infrastructure — is buying, today, a promise of continuity between who wins on paper and what happens in operations: a competitor defeated in open competition can still stay in the room through a channel the competition never provided for. That is not a problem in itself: complex systems often need transition support from whoever knows the prior infrastructure. It becomes one if no one inside the buying organisation keeps a register of who receives what, under what degree of competition — the same gap measured in an audit with no exit strategy. The concrete questions: which spending channels stay open toward a vendor that lost the main competition; whether every order to that vendor passes the same competitive review, or whether part of it slips under the simplified-acquisition threshold; and whether the figures a vendor states about itself have ever been checked by anyone other than the vendor — the same question we raise about who owns what a supplier builds on top of your data.

The two axes, applied to this case

Comply. Checking who really receives what, across dozens of suppliers and hundreds of orders, becomes a control running on the client’s contracts and systems, with a register of competitive exits: for each supplier, which orders went through open competition and which did not, under what threshold and justification, with an alert whenever a supplier defeated on a flagship award reappears on satellite orders carrying the same programme name — the record to show an inspector or a board.

Decide. The same system unifies contracts, suppliers, public registers and internal documents into a single operational model on which AI agents execute decisions with a human operator in command, for large enterprises, defence, the public sector and healthcare. Always in two modes: on-premises, with no deep integration into the client’s network, or a dedicated cloud with a dedicated VPN and a data centre in Italy, always with shared management.

From the first session, at no cost, comes the dated list of orders your suppliers keep receiving from you after losing a competition: for each one, the degree of competition applied and the office that issued it. It stays with you even if we do not go on to work together. Talk to one of our engineers about it.