Pentagon freezes out Anthropic as it signs deals with AI rivals

The Department of Defense announced on Friday that it had struck deals with seven leading artificial intelligence companies to deploy their systems within classified Pentagon networks.

Included in the roster of partnerships — intended for “lawful operational use” — are SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services.

“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 department said in a statement.

“Together, the War Department and these strategic partners share the conviction that American leadership in AI is indispensable to national security,” it added.

Under the agreements, systems will be rolled out within the department’s Impact Level 6 and Impact Level 7 network environments, where they are intended to streamline data synthesis, elevate situational understanding and augment decision-making in complex operational environments.

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the financial terms of the contracts.

Notably absent from the announcement is the AI frontier lab Anthropic, which the Department of Defense designated a supply-chain risk to U.S. national security in March. The move was the first of its kind against an American firm.

At the center of the dispute is Anthropic’s refusal to grant the Pentagon unrestricted access to its Claude models for use in fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance.

At the height of the furor, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a post on X, declared that “effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner” doing business with the Pentagon may engage in any commercial activity with the company.

Anthropic subsequently sued the Trump administration in two separate lawsuits, asking federal judges in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. to overturn the order; the case remains ongoing.

Signs of rapprochement, however, have emerged in recent weeks. President Donald Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles and other senior officials met with Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei at the White House on April 17.

Following the meeting, Trump told CNBC that a deal with the firm was “possible,” adding, “They’re very smart, and I think they can be of great use. I like smart people. I like high-IQ people, and they definitely have high IQs.”