Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and XAI Granted Up to $200M from Defense Department

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/14/anthropic-google-openai-xai-granted-up-to-200-million-from-dod.html

by ChrisArchitect • 1 year ago

216 130 1 year ago

cnbc.com

datadrivenangel• 1 year ago

These call order type packages mean that it's probably over 3-5 years, so not really that large a procurement.

kurthr• 1 year ago

I've worked with VCs that refereed to deals like these as "mouse nuts".

sandspar• 1 year ago

Maybe it's less about the money and more about signalling to foreign adversaries. "We're prepared to weaponize AI, so you should tread lightly." Everyone knows that in case of war those millions could turn into billions overnight. It's like a cowboy flashing his gun. It says he will use it.

whostolemyhat• 1 year ago

they're prepared to deploy reams of incoherent code? Gosh

rpmisms2• 1 year ago

In the words of Will Stancil: AYFKM?

A_D_E_P_T• 1 year ago

In fairness to poor Will, this contract was probably decided weeks or even months ago. The DoD isn't known for moving quickly or being responsive.

rpmisms2• 1 year ago

I disagree with Will on everything, but having AI decide you deserve violence is incredibly disturbing.

Lucasoato• 1 year ago

Meanwhile in Europe, we're sleeping on regulation and no real plan to face the challenges and opportunities linked to AI...

jokeasspsoe• 1 year ago

Spain is paying 1000 euro a month to their soldiers, that's how seriously we take defense

downrightmike• 1 year ago

They'd have more money now if they didn't skimp on ships 400 years ago. Gotta play the long game my dudes

layer83• 1 year ago

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/eu-launches-in...: “EU launches InvestAI initiative to mobilise €200 billion of investment in artificial intelligence”

And from https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/european-a...: “Both the Horizon Europe and Digital Europe programmes will invest €1 billion per year in AI.”

firesteelrain2• 1 year ago

That’s not a lot of money between four companies.

layer83• 1 year ago

It’s up to $200M for each of them. From the actual source:

“The awards to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI – each with a $200M ceiling – 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.”

(https://www.ai.mil/Latest/News-Press/PR-View/Article/4242822...)

throwaway287391• 1 year ago

Nice, should be enough for them to outbid Meta to retain 1 employee (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44308000)

firesteelrain2• 1 year ago

It’s still not a lot. How much do tokens cost for example?

In theory if it’s just labor with some profit mixed in, then you might be looking at 600 employees for each company.

I doubt it is just labor. Quote says $200 million ceiling. So maybe a time and materials (T&M) contract? It’s a ceiling so it’s not like they earn or are guaranteed $200m.

Has to include token or cloud computing time too. Which Google owns and can amortize themselves since it’s a capital asset to them. I don’t know much about the cloud computing background of Anthropic or if they are using Azure or AWS.

I think my original point is still valid it’s not a lot when you look at it

richardw• 1 year ago

Testing the waters. I’d guess if it pays any dividends things will ramp up. This is also across all suppliers. At some point they’ll put more wood behind fewer arrows.

whyenot• 1 year ago

I guess Zuck got the shaft?

layer83• 1 year ago

The $200M would only pay for a single researcher at Meta. ;)

clarle• 1 year ago

Are Amazon and Meta the ones losing out the most here, in terms of the companies building foundational models?

Probably more understandable for Meta, since they've been leaving the B2B space since Workplace has been sunset. Amazon losing out on this is pretty rough for AWS though.

haiku2077• 1 year ago

Meta and Amazon both have separate DoD contracts (Meta with Anduril, Amazon through massive GovCloud contracts)

paxys5• 1 year ago

Is Amazon trying to build a competitive foundation model? From what I can see AWS is instead focused on hosting and re-licensing Claude, Cohere, DeepSeek and others via Bedrock. And it's pretty likely that a large chunk of this $200M will anyways go to AWS. So I'd hardly call them a loser here.

XorNot• 1 year ago

Aka the "sell gold pans during a gold rush" strategy.

AFAIK AWS are pushing pretty hard with GovCloud these days.

corlinp• 1 year ago

Amazon has a number of foundation models under the name Amazon Nova, which they claimed were SOTA on release but I haven't heard much at all about them since.

prmph• 1 year ago

What is $200M to Amazon and Meta?

florbo• 1 year ago

At the very least it's preventing funds from going to other competitors.

moscoe• 1 year ago

Meta can add 1 more member to the technical staff

plasma_beam• 1 year ago

Most of US government runs significant workloads on AWS now and that’s only increasing. They’ve cornered govt cloud infrastructure (with Azure, GCP, etc. very far behind) so not sure this matters in grand scheme of things.

Anecdotal based on industry experience, no citations.

jedberg5• 1 year ago

The fact that XAI is in this list is just blatant corruption. Their CEO was a government employee until a month ago.

koolba3• 1 year ago

Why would that exclude them from the running? Should government contracts not be granted on the merits of the receivers? Grok clearly exists in this space so it’s not like they’re rewarding vaporware.

jedberg5• 1 year ago

Should government contracts not be granted on the merits of the receivers?

They should, but businesses owned by government employees should be excluded because it's too easy to corrupt the process. In fact, they have explicit rules about not doing that.

slantedview• 1 year ago

Should government contracts not be granted on the merits of the receivers?

The merits? We just had, in the last _week_, a huge scaldal where Grok was spewing racist, pro hitler content, even calling itself MechaHitler.

lttlrck• 1 year ago

If they weren't there it would raise just as many eyebrows, wouldn't it?

rany_• 1 year ago

Meta not being on the list is more suspect IMO. At least it seems to me that Meta is where the actual talent/potential is.

jedberg5• 1 year ago

Not really. It would be obvious to anyone who's ever seen a government contract that they were excluded for ethics reasons.

paxys5• 1 year ago

And their chatbot just had a Nazi meltdown last week.

AstroBen• 1 year ago

OpenAI is above 10 billion ARR and still growing fast.. this seems tiny in comparison?

paxys5• 1 year ago

2% of a company's revenue is definitely not tiny. And regardless, there's still reason to participate and hope the number gets bigger in the future.

bix68• 1 year ago

Why not 20x $10M grants for smaller companies? They're gonna throw this money with no oversight anyways so why not bolster the actual startup scene instead of a bunch of incumbents who all have more than enough cash? $10M could keep a startup running for 1+ years at its most crucial time. That's 10 solutions instead of 1 -- statistically one of them will be a massive breakthrough?

stuckkeys• 1 year ago

That is why we need folks like you running the government and not asshats that are currently in positions ruining it all for all.

DeepYogurt• 1 year ago

Why not 20x $10M grants for smaller companies?

That's not how corruption works

_2d308• 1 year ago

"Corruption is when the US government pays the 4 leading American AI producers for the use of their products"

TiredOfLife• 1 year ago

That is exactly how corruption works. Friends and families of decision makers make a bunch of small companies that win tenders.

xyst• 1 year ago

This isn’t a grant to push for innovation. This is a promise from the orange man administration to the people and companies that donated to his "inauguration fund"

This is a kleptocracy but with extra steps. People are unfortunately numb to it.

_2d308• 1 year ago

Which AI company _should_ the DoD purchase from?

paxys5• 1 year ago

Who are these smaller companies, and what do they have to offer that these 4 don't? Chances are that the smaller companies themselves are licensing the LLM from Google/Anthropic/OpenAI, so why pay middlemen for no reason?

bix68• 1 year ago

You’re telling me that you can’t find 10 worthwhile AI startups to give money to? I bet there are 1000 on crunchbase right now. With $10M some of them could buy hardware to build their own systems.

_2d308• 1 year ago

Who are those 20 companies? What would $10M do in the context of training LLMs that are competitive with Claude/O3/Gemini?

That's 10 solutions instead of 1 -- statistically one of them will be a massive breakthrough?

The statistic is that 10% of startups make a massive breakthrough? Would love to see some work that comes remotely close to replicating that! Startup investing would be trivially easy.

bix68• 1 year ago

Responded to the other poster with the same question.

Everyone says 1 out of 100 makes it big but the top 5-10% of a portfolio is still substantial. If we’re only giving the money to companies with revenue the odds of success are likely improved.

Startup investing is trivially easy. You give money to good companies and founders. There’s just a bunch of BS that gets in the way. Like giving massive money to big corps that don’t need it instead of startups that do.

koolba3• 1 year ago

$10M could keep a startup running for 1+ years at its most crucial time. That's 10 solutions instead of 1 -- statistically one of them will be a massive breakthrough?

The failure rate for startups is much higher than 90%. And there’s the additional complexity of how do you pick which 20 such startups get the cash.

bix68• 1 year ago

See my response to the other posters with the same notes

On the picking: it’s really not hard to search for AI companies and pick 20. In fact there are government programs that invest in startups so clearly it’s doable.

mustyoshi• 1 year ago

As an American. I'd rather a single well established player get a large contract and actually deliver, than 20 disjointed companies each get 1/20th of the problem, have to work in concert, and possibly not even deliver at all.

AzzyHN2• 1 year ago

Lobbying, probably

nyarlathotep_• 1 year ago

Is 'X' is going to develop an "Agentic" weapon to hunt down Will Stancil?

(Only partially joking here)

ushiroda80• 1 year ago

So basically one Ruoming Pang each...

paul7986• 1 year ago

Microsoft said they were beefing up their expenditure in AI with and or around the announcement of layoffs.

So does this mean all the web designers, web developers and many other white collar jobs will now be done by one such professional using AI; so XYZ use to require ten people to get the job done now only one who uses AI gets the tasks done (tasks that those ten use to use software applications to complete). All the while a few hundred of Ruoming Pangs make more money then God in which their work further helps killing white collar jobs.

Is there anyone else concerned about this? I am federal worker indirectly yet per some news today not sure how much longer I will be and whether or not it wise to go look for another web design/developer/UX Researcher (think this is safest out of three as you are talking to ppl)position. There are throngs of others looking now to compete against including now competing against AI for less jobs.

mistrial9• 1 year ago

try https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20230601STO...

unixhero• 1 year ago

Seems small???

almosthere• 1 year ago

This money should be going to companies that need 200M.

For 200M Google will open an account, send an email that says:

You're account is ready, there is $40m left on the retainer. We can code up some email template for 40M if you want.

pwarner• 1 year ago

or not spent by the government? I mean, unless this is for some really specific thing that really needs a push, I think there's sort of enough money flowing this way already, today. (5 years ago, again a different story)

snihalani2• 1 year ago

Would that align with our current administration's beliefs?

geor9e• 1 year ago

Kyle Reese is a crackpot and the Strategic Knowledge Yielding New Emerging Technologies grant program is important for re-industrializing America

diamond559• 1 year ago

Payback for the presidential library gifts. The Defense Department doesn't need one hallucinating chatbot let alone four...

fooker• 1 year ago

Hallucinating autonomous drones on the other hand...

vajrabum• 1 year ago

I know this is likely in the pipeline anyway and maybey not covered by this news but now we have the prospect of agentic llms hallucinating enemies and a digital finger on the trigger.

dmix2• 1 year ago

LLMs are only useful information systems, largely for parsing/managling variable data and building other information systems. Problem sets any large org like DoD has.

I don’t think anyone has even seriously proposed using them for weapons targeting, at least in the current broad LLM form.

If they are slow (2x as slow on a cruise missile or drone SOC) and are wrong all the time then why would they even bother? They already have AI models for visual targeting that are highly specialized for the specific job and even that’s almost entirely limited to very narrow vehicle or ship identification which is always combined with existing ballistic, radar, or GPS targeting.

Buying some LLM credits doesn’t help much at all there.

Too much of AI gets uncritically packaged with these hand wavy FUD statements IMO.

lukev2• 1 year ago

I'd like to believe you, but there's credible evidence that (e.g) DOGE has been using LLMs to cut funding for NSF or HHS using prompts in the vein of "is this grant woke."

Which is obviously stupid. So if stupid people are using these things in stupid ways, that seems bad.

noboostforyou• 1 year ago

the prospect of agentic llms hallucinating enemies and a digital finger on the trigger.

Minority Report takes place in 2054... Phillip K Dick might have been onto something.

WiSaGaN• 1 year ago

This actually makes sense because in the meantime Meta is ditching the open-source (open-weights) direction.

Before the national security narrative took over, the main argument was about "safe" AI, where releasing models as open weights was considered "not safe." Now that no major US AI players release premium open-weights models, the "safety" narrative isn't needed anymore—so cooperating with the US military is feasible again.

rustcleaner• 1 year ago

Hopefully we'll be lucky and brave patriots will take great risk occasionally leaking those models so we taxpayers can enjoy them too (not just Northrop-Martin).

snihalani2• 1 year ago

I'm surprised trump let XAI get money. maybe the breakup was staged

ivape2• 1 year ago

It’s easiest way to repay Elon’s $150 million. Now listen to this song again as you digest that:

https://youtu.be/VYOjWnS4cMY

sitkack• 1 year ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpxT9TLGoLI

tonyhart72• 1 year ago

lol, 150 mil for these AI company is not even cover their 1/10th monthly cost

its more of a "formal" cooperation than the actual work

tdstein• 1 year ago

Selective corporate stimulus. What happened to free markets?

ivape2• 1 year ago

The DoD, DARPA, NASA, tax funded arms of the US should have all the resources to train a frontier model.

AzzyHN2• 1 year ago

Considering the DoD's budget, $200M is chump change

kingofmen• 1 year ago

Also true when considering the size of the companies.

Simon_O_Rourke• 1 year ago

And a drop in the ocean what those companies are losing too on an annual basis.

seydor• 1 year ago

The Age of Grift continues

crvdgc• 1 year ago

A cold war joke goes: The US does have planned economy and its name is military contracts.

bko3• 1 year ago

One of the core responsibilities of the state is to protect itself. Not sure how you don't have this planned apart from anarchy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

ffsm82• 1 year ago

Pretty simple, you don't pay a private enterprise to develop it, instead you develop it yourself after hiring the best people.

At least that's how it was done back in the "golden years", post WW2, during which inequality was quite stable etc

peterbecich• 1 year ago

What ever happened to the JEDI contract?

dzonga• 1 year ago

musk is a tenderpreneur.

this is simply a loyalty payoff for supporting the current admin. same as the other tech companies that got these contracts.

tempaccount420• 1 year ago

... Are you not aware of the current Musk-Trump drama? He's literally making a new party

walls• 1 year ago

... Are you not aware of the current Musk-Trump drama? He's literally making a new party

The drama where he outed the president as a pedo, deleted it, and went back to boot licking?

Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and XAI Granted Up to $200M from Defense Department

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