The Department of Defense said Friday it has signed agreements with eight major artificial intelligence companies as part of a push to make the U.S. military an “AI-first fighting force.”
The companies, Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Oracle, Reflection and SpaceX, will provide resources to deploy their capabilities across secure military network environments, officials said.
Anthropic is noticeably absent from the list. The company has sparred with the Pentagon over its demand to allow unrestricted use of the technology.
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The department says this latest effort, however, is part of its AI Acceleration Strategy, aimed at expanding capabilities across warfighting, intelligence and enterprise operations. The technology will be integrated into Defense Department networks to streamline data synthesis, improve situational awareness and support decision-making in complex operational environments, officials said.
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The department pointed to early adoption of its GenAI.mil platform as evidence of the strategy’s reach, saying more than 1.3 million personnel have used the system, generating tens of millions of prompts and deploying hundreds of thousands of AI agents in the past five months. Officials said the tools are already being used by service members, civilians and contractors to complete tasks that previously took months in a matter of days.
Defense officials also said they are building the system architecture to avoid reliance on a single vendor.
In a statement, the department said the partnerships reflect a broader effort to maintain American leadership in artificial intelligence, calling it critical to national security and future military readiness.
