Special Investigations

Press Freedom Defense Fund

AI Giants Work Hand-in-Hand With the Pentagon, Contracts Reveal

The Intercept sued to obtain records that reveal an intimate relationship between the military and OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI.

The acrimonious breakup between Anthropic and the Department of Defense played out largely in public. But despite the high-profile salvos between the artificial intelligence giant and the Pentagon, ostensibly over the ethics of 21st-century warfare and corporate power, their actual falling out hinged on a government contract that has remained hidden away. Through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit conducted with the help of Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology, The Intercept obtained more than 400 pages of documents related to the U.S. military’s contracts with Anthropic and its chief competitors. They illuminate the surprisingly intimate relationship between Big Tech and the armed forces, and reveal new insights about the deals that led to the Anthropic crisis earlier this year.

The documents, many heavily redacted, consist of contract paperwork from deals originally signed in July 2025 between the Department of Defense and Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI, as well as later amendments to those agreements. Through the contracts, each worth up to $200 million, the companies agreed to build prototypes of artificial intelligence tools to “improve military advantage, military utility, or enhance military decision making” across the whole of the armed forces. These prototypes, aimed at applications from “warfighting” and automated decision-making to logistics and military intelligence, would go on to form the basis of the artificial intelligence tools now deployed across the Department of Defense’s classified networks. The document set includes one contract reflecting OpenAI’s classified network deployment; The Intercept is awaiting the government’s production of equivalent documents from the other contractors.

The contract materials show the close and complex partnership between the Pentagon and the AI industry, and detail the extent to which AI firms themselves are expected to influence how their technology is used to augment the U.S. capacity to wage war.

“This appears to be the first time the extent of collaboration between frontier AI labs and the Pentagon is spelled out in explicit terms,” Sophia Goodfriend, a University of Cambridge research fellow and non-resident fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative studying the impact of big data and machine learning on military conflict, told The Intercept. “What’s particularly notable is the terms by which engineers are working in lockstep with the department of war to engineer AI systems for surveillance, targeting, and killing.”

Official announcements following the 2025 deals were light on details and heavy on platitudes. “We must equip our warfighters with 21st-century technology in order to defeat 21st-century threats,” explained Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell at the time.

Google was similarly cagey: “These advanced AI solutions will enable the DoD to effectively address defense challenges and scale the adoption of agentic AI across enterprise systems to drive innovation and efficiency with agile, proven technology,” the company said.

“What’s particularly notable is the terms by which engineers are working in lockstep with the department of war to engineer AI systems for surveillance, targeting, and killing.”

“What’s particularly notable is the terms by which engineers are working in lockstep with the department of war to engineer AI systems for surveillance, targeting, and killing.”

The contract documents for the prototyping project paint a clearer picture, revealing deals that involve far more than a simple sale of software.

An “information sharing” provision in all four agreements, for instance, creates a two-way exchange of data and expertise. The companies agreed not only to provide access to their best large language models, but also to “inform DOD and CDAO [Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office] strategy on frontier AI and AI,” as phrased in the agreement with Google.

Under the agreements, the AI labs were approved to receive an array of sensitive information, which could include “benchmarks datasets for DoD use cases, appropriate briefings on DoD operational missions and threats to inform development / release of technologies, their application to DoD operational problems, or DoD plans and strategies for future AI adoption.”

All four companies would in turn provide the Pentagon “feedback on DoD strategies for frontier AI adoption to ensure that AI capabilities can be delivered and scaled to meet the warfighter’s needs.” The companies also pledged to offer briefings on corporate inner workings, including “frontier AI model........

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