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.<\/p>\n
Included in the roster of partnerships \u2014 intended for \u201clawful operational use\u201d \u2014 are SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese agreements accelerate the transformation toward establishing the United States military as an AI-first fighting force and will strengthen our warfighters\u2019 ability to maintain decision superiority across all domains of warfare,\u201d the department said in a statement.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cTogether, the War Department and these strategic partners share the conviction that American leadership in AI is indispensable to national security,\u201d it added. <\/p>\n Under the agreements, systems will be rolled out within the department\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the financial terms of the contracts.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n At the center of the dispute is Anthropic\u2019s refusal<\/a> to grant the Pentagon unrestricted access to its Claude models for use in fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. <\/p>\n