Thales in Advanced Talks With NATO States on HexaForce C2
French defence-technology group Thales is “quite advanced” in discussions with a number of NATO countries about adopting HexaForce, its artificial-intelligence-powered multi-domain command-and-control overlay, vice president for multi-domain operations Patrick Moreau told Defense News in a September 24 interview published September 25, 2026. HexaForce became available after testing at NATO’s Coalition Warrior Interoperability Exercise in Poland in June and is pitched as an open-architecture layer that plugs into legacy national systems from corps to battalion while letting users choose their own large language models. Thales set a user goal of planning roughly one thousand target missions a day—about a tenfold lift—while insisting operators still choose courses of action and “push the button.”
Filed under Industry and dated September 26, 2026, this AI4France briefing treats the NATO sales track as French sovereign-defence-AI news distinct from yesterday’s Impulsion IA skills plan. Moreau stressed Data-Centric Security and Federation Mission Networking standards, distributed mesh hubs rather than a single compute core, and agentic assistance for targeting preparation rather than automated fire—positioning HexaForce against US-supplied NATO C2 stacks and EU sovereignty worries.
Why it matters: European armies need faster planning without surrendering model choice. Interoperable AI overlays can help—but only if audit logs, human authorisation and model-swap rights stay contractual.
What it means in practice
French and allied programme leads should map which legacy C2 nodes HexaForce would touch; demand named human-authorisation gates for every fire option; assign an owner for model-selection policy; run time-boxed interoperability drills against SitaWare-class stacks; and prefer designs that keep humans on irreversible actions. Place the talks beside Thales’s HexaForce rules push and the ESA–Mistral LoI.
Caveats come first. Advanced talks are not signed contracts; throughput claims depend on clean sensor feeds; and AI-assisted targeting invites political scrutiny. AI4France therefore presents the NATO discussions as directional industry context until published national procurements appear.
What to watch next: first named NATO customer beyond France; how Arcadia relates to HexaForce; and whether export controls shape model choices. Readers can continue on the AI4France homepage, or browse the Newsroom for additional briefings.
Bottom line: treat this update as orientation, not instruction. French defence AI is moving from exercise demos toward allied negotiations and remains contingent. Organizations that benefit most will enforce human gates, keep operators on fire authority, and refuse to confuse an interview with finished fielding.