The Pentagon contracts all four frontier laboratories at once
On 14 July 2025 the Pentagon's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office announced awards to Anthropic, Google and xAI, each with a 200 million dollar ceiling. A month earlier, on 17 June, OpenAI had received the same.
Why it matters
The question of whether frontier laboratories work for the military closed for good: within four weeks all four were under contract, despite their usage policies differing. Differences between the companies stopped governing access and survived, if at all, as terms inside a contract.
The customer is the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office. The subject is developing agentic AI workflows across mission areas; agentic here means the system does not merely produce a plan but takes actions on it. The official wording: "The adoption of AI is transforming the Department's ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage", and the work is to "accelerate the use of advanced AI as part of our Joint mission essential tasks." The 200 million dollar figure is a ceiling, not a sum paid, and the two must not be confused. The record rests on a single trade publication; the office's own release was not read here. Confidence is medium.