After Rift With Anthropic, DOD Signs With 7 New AI Firms

The Pentagon just locked in a who's who of AI heavyweights for classified work, deepening the military's reliance on Silicon Valley, even as one major holdout fumes on the sidelines. Per the Wall Street Journal, defense officials say they've now signed contracts to use models from OpenAI, Google, Elon Musk's xAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, and startup Reflection AI inside secure systems, moving beyond pilot deals and into day-to-day deployment across the Defense Department. "These agreements accelerate the transformation toward establishing the United States military as an AI-first fighting force and will strengthen our warfighters' ability to maintain decision superiority across all domains of warfare," the DOD says in a release.

The push follows a bitter break with Anthropic, whose Claude models had been among the only AI tools available in classified environments via Palantir's Maven platform. After a contract fight, the Pentagon labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this week called CEO Dario Amodei an "ideological lunatic" in congressional testimony. The new agreements bring in Nvidia's Nemotron models and Reflection AI, which is backed by Nvidia and closely aligned with the Trump administration. Both emphasize open-source AI, which Nvidia chief Jensen Huang argues is safer and easier to tailor for national-security usage.

Multiple companies say their contracts include guardrails against uses such as mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry; the Pentagon says such activities would be illegal and insists it will use AI responsibly. The New York Times notes that defense officials are crossing their fingers that deals with all of these other companies will convince Anthropic to stop worrying about the "any lawful use" standard the Pentagon wants on AI, which has been a major sticking point. Per Reuters, ex-DOD officials and IT vendors with military ties have said they didn't want to give up Anthropic's systems, as they believe they're better than anything else out there.