The Defense Department’s (DoD) Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) said today it has awarded contracts for four prominent artificial intelligence (AI) technology developers to help the Pentagon speed adoption of “advanced AI capabilities” including agentic applications.
The four firms each receiving an award with a $200 million contract ceiling are Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI.
Those contracts, the CDAO said, “will enable the Department to leverage the technology and talent of U.S. frontier AI companies to develop agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas.”
“Establishing these partnerships will broaden DoD use of and experience in frontier AI capabilities and increase the ability of these companies to understand and address critical national security needs with the most advanced AI capabilities U.S. industry has to offer,” the CDAO said.
“The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries,” commented Chief Digital and AI Officer Dr. Doug Matty.
“Leveraging commercially available solutions into an integrated capabilities approach will accelerate the use of advanced AI as part of our Joint mission essential tasks in our warfighting domain as well as intelligence, business, and enterprise information systems,” Matty said.
On the use-case front, CDAO explained that it’s adopting a “commercial-first approach” to accelerating DoD adoption of AI,” and that the contracts announced today “ bring in the best U.S.-based frontier AI talent to help apply cutting-edge AI to solve DoD use cases.
“CDAO is also providing access to many of the latest generative AI (GenAI) models for general purpose use to Combatant Commands, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Joint Staff via Army’s Enterprise Large Language Model Workspace powered by AskSage, and to the broader enterprise via embedded AI models within DoD enterprise data and AI platforms, including the Advancing Analytics (Advana) platform, Maven Smart System, and Edge Data Mesh nodes, which enable AI integration into workflows that occur within these data environments themselves,” the DoD AI office said.
CDAO also is “partnering with the General Services Administration (GSA) to bring the best AI technologies to the federal government while leveraging whole-of-government buying power for AI production and compute resources,” the office said.