The Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office has awarded contracts to four U.S. frontier artificial intelligence companies to advance the Department of Defense’s adoption of AI capabilities.
Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI were awarded contracts with a $200 million ceiling to develop agentic AI workflows for various mission areas, CDAO said Monday, noting that the partnerships will broaden DOD use of and experience in frontier AI capabilities and increase the ability of the companies to understand and address critical national security needs.
“The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries,” said Chief Digital and AI Officer 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.”
As part of the action to accelerate AI adoption to solve DOD use cases, CDAO is also providing combatant commands, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Joint Staff with access to the latest generative AI models for general purpose use via the U.S. Army’s Enterprise Large Language Model Workspace powered by Ask Sage.
The capability will also be accessible to the broader enterprise via embedded AI models within DOD enterprise data and AI platforms, including the Advancing Analytics platform, Maven Smart System, and Edge Data Mesh nodes, to integrate AI into operational workflows.
In another step to strengthen its AI capabilities, the DOD is collaborating with the General Services Administration to bring AI technologies to the federal government, leveraging the purchasing power of the entire government for AI production and computing resources.
