Microsoft and Amazon joined other leading artificial intelligence companies in signing deals to deploy their technology in classified Pentagon networks, the Defense Department announced Friday, accelerating a push to build what the military is calling an “AI-first fighting force.”
The agreements — which also include OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, SpaceX and the startup Reflection — will give those firms’ AI systems access to the military’s most classified network environments, known as Impact Level 6 and Impact Level 7. The Pentagon said the technology will be used to analyze data and improve battlefield decision-making.
“Together, the War Department and these strategic partners share the conviction that American leadership in AI is indispensable to national security,” the Pentagon said in a statement, using the Trump administration’s preferred name for the Defense Department.
The Pentagon says the effort is already well underway. More than 1.3 million Defense Department personnel have used GenAI.mil, the military’s official AI platform, generating tens of millions of prompts and deploying hundreds of thousands of agents in just five months, according to the department. Officials say the technology has cut some tasks from months to days.
The deals come as the Pentagon is locked in a legal battle with Anthropic, one of the nation’s leading AI labs, which had sought guarantees its technology would not be used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. The Defense Department moved to blacklist Anthropic earlier this year, calling the company a national security risk — a designation Anthropic is contesting in court.
On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei an “ideological lunatic” and slammed the company during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.
Bloomberg reported that the Pentagon negotiated its deal with Amazon Web Services late into Thursday night, according to two officials briefed on the talks.
“We look forward to continuing to support the Department of War’s modernization efforts, building AI solutions that help them accomplish their critical missions,” AWS spokesman Tim Barrett said in a statement.
Hundreds of Google employees sent a letter to company leadership this week urging them to refuse to let the Pentagon use its AI on classified data.
“We want to see AI benefit humanity; not to see it being used in inhumane or extremely harmful ways,” they wrote, according to The Washington Post.
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