WASHINGTON, May 1 (Reuters) – The Pentagon said on Friday it has reached agreements with seven AI companies to bring their advanced capabilities to the Pentagon’s sensitive networks, aiming to expand the reach of AI providers working across the military.
Notably, the statement excludes Anthropic, which is in a dispute with the Department of Defense over guardrails due to the military’s use of artificial intelligence tools.
Earlier this year, the Pentagon classified the AI startup, which is widely used across the Department of Defense, as a supply chain risk, banning its use by the Pentagon and its contractors.
SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, and several Amazon Web Services are already working with the Department of Defense and will be integrated into impact level 6 and 7 network environments, further expanding military access to their products, the Pentagon said in a statement.
The Pentagon said in a statement that it will avoid “vendor lock” that would likely imply over-reliance on Anthropic by expanding the AI services provided to the military, which uses AI for planning, logistics, targeting and a variety of other purposes to streamline and execute large-scale operations faster.
Pentagon officials, former officials and IT contractors who work closely with the U.S. military told Reuters they believe Anthropic’s AI tools are better than alternatives and are reluctant to let them go, despite orders to remove them within the next six months.
AI is becoming increasingly important to the US military. GenAI.mil, the Department of Defense’s leading AI platform, is used by more than 1.3 million Department of Defense employees after five months of operation, the company said in a statement.
Google, which is already used within the Pentagon, has signed a deal that will allow the Pentagon to use its artificial intelligence models for classified operations, officials told Reuters earlier this week.
Humanity still faces “risk”
Emile Michael, the Pentagon’s chief technology officer, told CNBC on Friday that Anthropic remains a supply chain risk, but that Mythos, the company’s artificial intelligence model with advanced cyber capabilities that has been controversial among U.S. officials and American companies over its ability to overreach hackers, is “another national security moment.”
Many businesses, public and private organizations now have access to the Mythos preview product to protect their IT infrastructure from future cyberattacks, but it is unclear whether the Department of Defense is participating in the program.
US President Donald Trump said last week that Anthropic was “shaping up” in his administration’s eyes, opening the door for the AI company to overturn a Pentagon blacklist.
Still, the conflict has increased the need to diversify the supply of AI tools for the military and opened new opportunities for small artificial intelligence startups in the defense industry.
(Reporting by Doina Chiacu and Chris Sanders; Editing by Kevin Liffey, Chizu Nomiyama and Tomasz Janowski)
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