Anthropic, Google, OpenAI And XAI Get $800M To Hop In Bed With Pentagon

The Pentagon's embrace of the AI industry just put up to $800 million on the table as the Department of Defense has issued a quartet of contracts bringing the biggest names in the biz officially into the fold. 

The Pentagon's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) today announced contracts with Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI to help it use artificial intelligence for a multitude of military purposes - each with a $200 million ceiling. 

The four firms contracted for the work are all behind AI models the DoD believes have game-changing defense applications. The Pentagon appears particularly eager to pursue agentic AI, mentioning in the announcement that it hopes to use the skills of AI experts at the four firms "to develop agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas." 

The DoD hopes the early experiments will help it understand how to apply AI for its purposes, while the four firms will also be asked "to understand and address critical national security needs." 

"Leveraging commercially available solutions into an integrated capabilities approach will accelerate the use of advanced AI as part of our Joint mission essential tasks," said CDAO Chief Digital and AI Officer Doug Matty. 

While the benefits for the four contractors are fairly obvious, the DoD is also getting a good deal, it thinks. 

America's military is getting access to Google's newest AI models, for example, and the Chocolate Factory is also offering the Pentagon access to Google infrastructure around the country. Anthropic, meanwhile, said that it will be helping the military identify the best AI use cases and developing models tuned on DoD data, identifying and mitigating adversarial uses of AI, and working to "prototype frontier AI capabilities that advance US national security."

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Anthropic did note that its multi-million-dollar contract with the DoD is for two years, answering one of several questions we asked that the Pentagon declined to answer. 

xAI, meanwhile, only noted the contract along with a deal that now sees its products available for purchase by the US via the General Services Administration, meaning they're generally available across the federal government.  

While mentioned in the CDAO press release, OpenAI has had its own $200 million DoD frontier AI deal since last month, when the DoD announced a pilot program to see the ChatGPT maker develop unspecified frontier AI products for the Pentagon.

OpenAI confirmed to The Register that the $200 million announcement it shared in June is the same award as its June one, making this more of an expansion to the earlier announcement than a new deal for the company. 

To sum it all up, it looks like employees can protest defense contracts all they want, and companies can insist they don't want to be involved in defense work, but at the end of the day, it's pretty tough to resist Uncle Sam's money and all that sweet, sweet data. Welcome to the military industrial complex, folks. ®