The Pentagon announced on Friday that it had reached deals with some of the technology industry’s biggest companies in an effort to expand the military’s artificial intelligence capabilities and increase the number of firms authorized to be on classified networks.
The companies, according to the Defense Department, agreed to allow the Pentagon to employ their technology for “any lawful use,” a standard resisted by Anthropic, which was initially the only artificial intelligence model available on classified markets.
The Pentagon had previously confirmed deals with Elon Musk’s xAI, OpenAI and Google. In addition the Pentagon said it had reached deals with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Nvidia and Reflection AI, a start-up.
“These agreements accelerate the transformation toward establishing the United States military as an A.I.-first fighting force,” the Pentagon said in a statement.
Defense Department officials hope the new deals will push Anthropic to drop its reservations about the military’s broad “any lawful use” standard.
President Trump has ordered the government to cut ties with Anthropic, but for now the company’s technology remains on classified networks and intelligence analysts still depend on the firm’s models. While the Pentagon wants to quickly move to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, there have been growing pains and technical problems.
Anthropic and the Pentagon are currently in federal litigation over the Defense Department’s decision to label the company a supply chain risk, a novel use of the government’s power to raise concerns about how corporations build their products.
White House officials, impressed and worried about the power of Anthropic’s newest model, Mythos, have been pushing for a compromise that would end the company’s feud with the Pentagon, or at least allow other parts of the government to work with the firm.
The deal with the companies was reported earlier by Bloomberg.
A Pentagon official said the new agreements would help prevent “vendor lock” and ensure that the military would not have to depend on any one company. The military also wants firms to agree to a single standard, and has been loath to give firms contractual guarantees about how their models will be used.
Anthropic and the Pentagon have been locked in a debate over whether the company’s Claude model could be used to pilot autonomous drones or work on domestic surveillance. The Pentagon says it does not intend to use the model for either of those activities, but the two sides have not agreed on contractual language, or if it is even necessary.
In its announcement, the Pentagon did not specify how it would use the new A.I. tools but said the agreement would help service members make faster and better decisions.
“Access to a diverse suite of A.I. capabilities from across the resilient American technology stack will give war fighters the tools they need to act with confidence and safeguard the nation against any threat,” the Pentagon said.
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
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