The US Department of Defense (DoD), also known as the Department of War, has signed agreements to deploy eight major AI companies’ technology on its private networks for “for lawful operational use”.
The companies are SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection.AI, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle. Their technologies will be rolled out on the Department’s Impact Level 6 and 7 network environments to streamline data synthesis, elevate situational understanding and augment “warfighter” decision-making in complex operation environments, it said.
Impact Level 6 and 7 environments handle secret and highly restricted data, respectively, and are the two highest levels of clearance available to the Department.
This effort supports the DoD’s AI Acceleration Strategy, released on 9 January in response to an Executive Order by President Trump. The strategy focuses on deploying AI for across “warfighting”, intel and enterprise, including sub-priorities of battle management, intel-to-capability development and enterprise AI development, among others.
The DoD already operates an official AI platform known as GenAI.mil, which it said has been used by over 1.3 million personnel, who have generated tens of millions of prompts and deployed hundreds of thousands of agents since its launch in December. It additionally claimed that the tool has cut the time to complete many tasks from months to days.
This new approach is a response to the failure of the DoD’s integration of Anthropic’s technology into its software earlier in the year, which led to an ongoing lawsuit between the two parties.
Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s chief technology officer, told CNBC on Friday that “we’ve learned since we started this effort at the Department of War is that it’s irresponsible to be reliant on any one partner […] that partner didn’t want to work with us in the way we wanted to work with them.”
By signing deals with eight different companies, the DoD is able to get “the best of the best,” he added.
