Pentagon Seeks $30.3 Million to Build AI-Driven Polygraph Next

If approved, the plan would pair AI scoring with remote cameras to speed vetting, raising scientific and legal concerns over accuracy and bias.

Overview

The Pentagon requested $30.3 million over five years for a program called Polygraph+ or Polygraph Next on Friday, Sept. 25, 2026 to develop AI scoring and touch-free ‘standoff’ physiological sensing.
The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency would run the program to support background checks and insider-threat detection, but the budget is not yet approved by Congress and specific technologies and vendors remain undisclosed.
The Defense Innovation Unit previously funded non-contact prototypes from Presage Technologies and Altec Research that use cameras and thermal sensors to estimate heart rate, breathing, skin temperature and subtle movements.
Deception researchers and legal scholars warn the move risks amplifying known polygraph flaws because physiological signals track stress not truth, examiners show subjectivity, and trained countermeasures can defeat tests.
Applied at DoD scale, an imperfect system could flag large numbers of people, skew outcomes against minority groups, and function more as a leak-hunting or deterrent tool than a validated screening method.