The Pentagon announced Monday that it has chosen Google, Xai, Anthropic and Openai to help the US military expand its use of advanced artificial intelligence capabilities.
According to notifications from Chief Digital and AI Offices, companies have received contracts worth up to $200 million. Companies help the Department of Defense develop agent AI workflows for key national security missions.
“Utilizing off-the-shelf solutions in an integrated functional approach will accelerate the use of intelligence, business and enterprise information systems as part of the essential tasks of the Warfighting domain's joint mission.”
Military services employ generative AI tools for a variety of tasks, to varying degrees, from technical support to file searches. Agent AI uses more advanced inference to address and act on more complex challenges.
The Pentagon did not specify missions the program supports, but the department said it would like to use AI in areas such as intelligence analytics, campaigns, logistics and data collection.
Following the announcement, Xai (where the conversational AI chatbot is featured under the name Grok) by Elon Musk has announced a US government-specific production line called Grok.
Grok was scrutinized after the update produced many racist and anti-Semitic comments. In one example, the chatbot called itself “Mecha Hitler.”
The award follows a months-long push for masks to reduce federal spending from within the White House. Amid the masses' dropout earlier this summer, President Donald Trump threatened to cancel the government contract awarded to the mask company. But under this new deal, federal work for the billionaires will expand.
Courtney Albon is a C4ISRNET space and emerging technology reporter. She has been covering the US military since 2012, focusing on the Air Force and Space Force. She reports on some of the Pentagon's most important acquisition, budget and policy challenges.
