UPDATED 5\/1\/26 at 1:05 pm and 4:05 pm: This story was updated with further details from DoD and to reflect a later announcement that Oracle had been added to the list of companies to deploy on classified networks.<\/p>\n
WASHINGTON \u2014 The Pentagon announced this morning that it has made agreements with eight leading tech firms to deploy their AIs on its classified networks.<\/p>\n
An initial press release <\/a>sent out this morning listed seven firms: Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, SpaceX, NVIDIA and Reflection<\/a>, a newer startup backed by NVIDIA<\/a>. Later today, the Pentagon CTO\u2019s office posted<\/a> on X<\/a> that \u201cOracle has officially agreed to join the list of AI companies deploying frontier capabilities on the Department\u2019s classified networks.\u201d<\/p>\n Some of the companies are already on contract, a Pentagon spokesperson told Breaking Defense, while others are still finalizing the details.<\/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 initial announcement<\/a> says.<\/p>\n The eight companies\u2019 AIs are now approved for networks classified as Impact Level 6<\/a>, which refers to networks handling secret data, and Impact Level 7, a semi-official term for the most highly classified systems. It\u2019s the latest expansion of Secretary Pete Hegseth\u2019s push to bring rapidly advancing commercial AI into the Defense Department, building on the standup of the secure but unclassified GenAI.mil platform in December<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIntegrating secure frontier AI capabilities into the Department\u2019s Impact Level 6 (IL6) and Impact Level 7 (IL7) network environments will streamline data synthesis, elevate situational understanding, and augment warfighter decision-making in complex operational environments,\u201d the announcement continues.<\/p>\n Notably absent from the list of firms is Anthropic, whose Claude AI was already in use on classified networks as part of Palantir\u2019s Maven toolkit, but which the administration has tried to ban<\/a> from government work, leading to a brace of lawsuits<\/a>. Despite the ban, the secretive National Security Agency is reportedly<\/a> using Anthropic\u2019s new and not yet publicly available Mythos model, which is said<\/a> to have significant cyber warfare capabilities.<\/p>\n Pentagon CTO Emil Michael, the under secretary for research & engineering, took a thinly veiled shot at Anthropic when discussing<\/a> the announcement on CNBC this morning:<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we\u2019ve learned since we started this effort at the Department of War is that it\u2019s irresponsible to be reliant on any one partner, and we learned that that one partner didn\u2019t really want to work with us in the way we wanted to work with them,\u201d Michael said, using the Trump administration\u2019s new name for the Department of Defense<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u201c[So] we went out and made sure that we had multiple different providers \u2014 both open source, which is a new effort here at the department, and the proprietary model companies and the infrastructure companies like Microsoft and AWS \u2014 and got them to agree to sign up to work with us on classified networks to make sure we had diversity of supply.\u201d<\/p>\n The Pentagon announcements did not specify when the AI models would be available on classified networks or how much, if anything, the companies are being paid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"UPDATED 5\/1\/26 at 1:05 pm and 4:05 pm: This story was updated with further details from DoD and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24836,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[4602,321,53,111,420,7829,1393,320,7828,151,388,658,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-24835","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-microsoft","8":"tag-ai-autonomy","9":"tag-amazon","10":"tag-anthropic","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence-ai","12":"tag-azure","13":"tag-azure-ai","14":"tag-cyber-security","15":"tag-microsoft","16":"tag-microsoft-ai","17":"tag-networks","18":"tag-pentagon","19":"tag-spacex","20":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24835\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}