After landing deals with Google, SpaceX and OpenAI, the US Department of Defense he said on Friday that it signed deals with Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Reflection AI that allow it to deploy its AI technology and models on its classified networks for “legitimate business use.”
“These agreements accelerate the transformation toward establishing the United States military as an AI-first fighting force and will enhance the ability of our warfighters to maintain decision superiority in all areas of war,” the statement said.
The deals come as the US Department of Defense has accelerated its diversification of AI suppliers in the wake of its contentious dispute with Anthropic over the terms of use of its AI models. The Pentagon wanted unrestricted use of Anthropic’s AI tools, but the AI lab insisted on guardrails to prevent Anthropic’s technology from being used for domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.
The two are currently battling it out in court, though Anthropic won an injunction in March against the Pentagon’s move to label the company a “supply chain risk.”
“The Department will continue to build an architecture that prevents AI vendor lock-in and ensures long-term flexibility for the Joint Force,” the statement said. “Access to a variety of AI capabilities from across America’s resilient technology stack will give warfighters the tools they need to act confidently and protect the nation from any threat.”
DOD said the companies’ AI hardware and models will be deployed in Impact Level 6 (IL6) and Impact Level 7 (IL7) environments to “streamline data synthesis, improve situational understanding and enhance warfighter decision-making.” IL6 and IL7 are high-level security classifications for data and information systems that are considered critical to national security and require the physical protection of these systems, through strict access controls and audits.
The Pentagon said more than 1.3 million DOD personnel have so far used its secure enterprise platform for genetic artificial intelligence, GenAI.milwhich provides access to large language models (LLM) and other artificial intelligence tools in government-approved cloud environments. It is designed to assist primarily with non-classified tasks such as research, drafting and data analysis.
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