Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI have all been awarded up to $200 million in two-year contracts from the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, the government organization working to fuel the adoption of data, analytics and AI in the U.S. Department of Defense. With these new partnerships, the CDAO aims to take a commercial-first approach to leveraging the latest AI innovations to solve DoD use cases.
The contract awards allow the DoD to leverage the technology and workforces of each of the four prominent AI companies, enabling it to design agentic AI workflows across various mission areas. Additionally, the CDAO is granting access to many of the latest generative AI models to combatant commands, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Staff for general use.
The agreement requires these “frontier AI” companies to prototype new capabilities intended to advance U.S. national security. Anthropic, for instance, states it will identify where AI can deliver the most impact, then develop working prototypes built on DoD data. It will also work to anticipate and mitigate potential adversarial uses of AI and exchange its technical insights to fuel responsible AI adoption across the defense sector.
As part of a pilot program with the DoD, OpenAI launched an initiative called OpenAI for Government in June. The initiative offers government entities access to OpenAI’s most capable models within secure and compliant environments, custom models for national security as well as insights to anticipate new AI applications.
Google Public Sector is equipping the DoD with cloud tensor processing units, which are optimized for training AI models, as well as Agentspace, a tool that lets AI agents securely access applications to find what its user needs. The DoD will also have access to Google’s Contiguous United States infrastructure for AI.
“The adoption of AI is transforming the department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries,” Doug Matty, DoD chief digital and AI officer, said in a statement. “Leveraging commercially available solutions into an integrated capabilities approach will accelerate the use of advanced AI as part of our joint mission essential tasks in our warfighting domain as well as intelligence, business and enterprise information systems.”
