The US Department of Defense has awarded contracts to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI with a ceiling of $200 million to each vendor to leverage AI models for national security.
The award, announced by the DoD's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO), amounts to a major win for frontier AI companies looking to advance in the public sector.
Google Cloud has the most built-out public sector business of the four companies awarded contracts by the DoD.
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According to CDAO, the awards to the AI companies are aimed at developing "agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas."
Chief Digital and AI Officer Dr. Doug Matty said in a release that the awards are part of a strategy to implement commercial AI tools first. “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," said Matty.
In a Google Cloud post, the company said the DoD can deploy using its Contiguous United States (CONUS) infrastructure for AI. This infrastructure leverages Google Cloud tools like TPUs, Agentspace and broader offerings in a separate Google Public Sector cloud.
Anthropic noted that it is building out its public sector efforts and gaining traction by leveraging Claude at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and in US defense workflows with Palantir. Anthropic also has a government version of Claude called Claude Gov for national security customers built on top of AWS infrastructure.
For its part, OpenAI recently launched its government initiatives and has had a tailored version of ChatGPT for US government agencies since January. OpenAI for Government promises expertise and customer models for the Defense Department. xAI launched Grok For Government alongside the DoD contract.
Here's a look at the DoD's AI readiness framework.
