Pentagon reaches deals with eight AI companies for military development
May 1 (UPI) -- The Pentagon announced Friday that it has reached deals with eight artificial intelligence companies to deploy their software department-wide.
The agreements with SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Oracle are meant to help streamline data analysis, elevate situational understanding and improve warfighter decision-making, the Department of Defense said in a press release.
The eight companies' AI products will be integrated into the Impact Level 6 and Impact Level 7 network environments, as well as GenAI.mil, the Pentagon's official AI platform, to be made available to the several million people who work for the department.
The exclusion of a deal with Anthropic, whose Claude AI technology is among the most popular in the United States, follows a fallout earlier this year between the company and the department over its products being used to wage war.
"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 Pentagon said in the release.
"Access to a diverse suite of AI capabilities from across the resilient American technology stack will give warfighters the tools they need to act with confidence and safeguard the nation against any threat," it said.
The deals come as part of the department's AI Acceleration Strategy announced in January, which is meant to integrate the technology into all areas of the department as part of speeding analysis and use of intelligence, which is then expected to improve battlefield decision-making.
The department said that more than 1.3 million of its personnel have generated millions of prompts and deployed hundreds of thousands of agents through GenAI.mil since the strategy was announced, and many tasks that previously would have taken months are being done in days.
Anthropic has been left out of the development after it sued the federal government for declaring it a supply-chain risk and blocking federal government agencies from using its products after it objected to its Claude model being used for mass surveillance or for autonomous weapons use.
After days of back and forth between the company and the Trump administration, the $200 million contract Anthropic had signed in 2025 was canceled and government workers are no longer allowed to use its products.
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This story was originally published May 1, 2026 at 2:45 PM.