Pentagon Signs AI Deals With 8 Companies, Excludes Anthropic From Secret-Level Network Access

According to Beating News, the Pentagon announced agreements with eight technology companies to deploy their AI tools and infrastructure on U.S. military secret-level (IL6) and top-secret (IL7) networks. The newly signed companies include Nvidia, Microsoft, AWS, Reflection AI, plus previously contracted xAI, OpenAI, Google, and Oracle.

All signatories agreed to allow the Pentagon to use their technology for "any lawful purpose." Anthropic was excluded from the list, despite Claude being the Pentagon's sole large language model in classified environments. According to The New York Times, citing sources, at least some of the newly contracted companies privately received safeguards similar to Anthropic's demands, restricting use in autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance.