Sterling, an award-winning Global Solutions Integrator, announced today that Quantum Helix (QHx) AI Identity has been deemed awardable by the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) for listing on their exclusive Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace (TSM).
QHx provides cryptographic identity and verifiable accountability for AI workloads operating on military networks. It was developed by Messier 42 (M42) under a Sterling-funded joint development agreement, building on M42’s existing Quantum Helix platform. Sterling holds exclusive federal delivery and services rights, and the solution reaches government customers through an established route to market via the Dell Technologies OEM program.
“Securing the Department of War’s data and AI operations demands assured cybersecurity, ethical governance, constant evolution, streamlined execution, and post-quantum resilience for tomorrow’s networks,” said Ira Bargon, Sterling’s Federal Chief Technology Officer. “QHx delivers on each of these fronts, supplying our federal clients with a secure, trusted solution that reduces complexity while at the same time bringing a differentiated capability that provides for security and verifies that the appropriate mechanisms are in place, leading to guarantees that are much, much higher.”
With QHx, every AI workload receives a short-lived identity rooted in hardware attestation, minted at runtime and rotated continuously, with no static API keys and no reliance on network location. On top of that identity layer, QHx notarizes the traffic itself. A QHx notary intermediates the inference protocol and produces signed receipts for every prompt, response, and tool call, each bound to the attested identity of the workload that produced it. Commanders and auditors receive a tamper-evident record of what every AI system said and did, carried over post-quantum secure transport.
“Every inference call in a contested environment has to answer two questions: which workload made it, and what exactly was said,” said Andrés Vega, founder and CEO of M42. “QHx answers both with a hardware-attested identity and a signed receipt for each exchange. Frontier labs have now built workload identity into their APIs. This work makes the same primitive hold up on military networks, where the connection drops and the audit trail still has to survive. We are grateful to Sterling and Dell for backing the development and carrying it to the warfighter.”
TSM, the CDAO’s acquisition ecosystem, streamlines traditional procurement and accelerates the delivery of emerging technology across the Department of War, using vendor-submitted video pitches assessed against federal standards to surface validated, high-impact solutions. By attaining an awardable designation, QHx AI Identity has been evaluated through competitive procedures that satisfy the requirements of the FAR, DFARS, and the Department’s Other Transaction authorities.
Government IT leaders interested in viewing the QHx AI Identity solution page can do so here. To read more about QHx, visit www.sterling.com/quantum-helix.