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.”
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 performance, case studies on current or likely future frontier AI applications, or projections of future trends in frontier AI maturation.”
The labs would sometimes be the ones offering intelligence briefings on foreign actors, with Google tapped to inform the Pentagon on “AI tactics and techniques of adversaries” of the United States. These briefings would be conducted in both unclassified and classified settings.
The collaboration also entails Big Tech providing training and educational seminars directly to the military, including “Presentations and briefings at technical exchange meetings on relevant topics, including frontier AI model performance and case studies of frontier AI applications.” One document notes that Google, for example, would lead multiple seminars on “responsible AI” deployment.” The documents state engineers and policy experts from all four contractors will conduct “tabletop exercises,” gamified simulations of real-world scenarios, with the Pentagon.
This back and forth between the military and private sector would, the Pentagon hoped, allow for “iterative refinement of frontier AI models to address real-world challenges in areas such as intelligence analysis, cybersecurity, and autonomous systems,” according to contract language with all four companies.
The AI companies were contractually scheduled to provide “risk forecasting, and threat ideation exercises” — predictions of pitfalls and dangers their own products might pose in the future. “Frontier AI labs have advanced risk forecasting tradecraft and a clear vision of the next wave of frontier AI technological developments,” the contracts read. “Frontier AI companies can help DoD gain a better understanding of the risks that might be associated with subsequent near-term frontier AI models or features, to avoid strategic surprise and to mitigate the associated risks.”
Heidy Khlaaf, chief scientist at the AI Now Institute and former safety engineer at OpenAI, told The Intercept this is a dubious claim with dangerous implications. Pointing to recent disclosures by OpenAI and Anthropic that semi-autonomous large language models broke into computer networks owned by other companies during testing, Khlaaf questioned their fitness to help build guardrails in the first place. “This is a very concerning development,” she said.
According to Khlaaf, the “risk forecasts” so far offered by frontier AI labs have been light on evidence and tend to “emphasize self-beneficial skewed risks such as a purported AI arms race and speculative ‘existential’ risks,” like self-aggrandizing science fiction-style “Terminator” scenarios.
Trusting companies to self-report the risks of their own products constitutes a conflict of interest and a “subversion of democratic processes.”
The public would be better served, she said, with a reliance on independent assessment of the risks these companies present, not the word of the companies themselves. Trusting companies to self-report the risks of their own products constitutes both a conflict of interest, Khlaaf added, and a “subversion of democratic processes when AI labs are allowed to take over the arbitration of risk determinations with life-or-death consequences.”
As the prototyping effort progressed, the contract documents show the scope of the project expanded. New versions of the contract show additional deliverables included in the list of what the Pentagon was purchasing. The government redacted descriptions of these new deliverables on the basis of military secrecy and corporate confidentiality.
It was during the negotiation of these subsequent amendments when Anthropic and the Pentagon had their falling out. Anthropic refused to sign a follow-up deal to allow deployment of its technology on classified military networks without contractual prohibitions against use for domestic spying and autonomous weapons, leading Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to designate the firm a “supply chain risk” in March and ban its services from government use, a decision overturned by a federal judge last month.
The Department of Defense quickly reached follow-up agreements with Anthropic’s main competitors — Google, OpenAI, and xAI — to apply the tools they had been developing since the summer of 2025 to classified military networks. OpenAI’s deal, described by CEO Sam Altman as “definitely rushed,” was reportedly finalized on February 27. The following day, the company published a blog post defending “Our agreement with the Department of War” and insisting there were clauses prohibiting its technology’s use for domestic surveillance.
An amended contract document obtained by The Intercept through its lawsuit dated February 27 contains new language, including a clause noting that OpenAI will embed company engineers within the military to aid U.S. Government employees in implanting and utilizing its AI system. These workers, the document notes, “can be deployed to warfighting support settings including, but not limited to, combatant commands, service components, and theatre components.” The February 27 amendments also include a section on “System Oversight” is redacted in its entirety.
None of the documents released to The Intercept pertaining to xAI or Google’s equivalent agreements contain any such oversight section.
Two documents indicate the Department of Defense asked OpenAI to minimize the extent to which its large language model would refuse to do what was requested by the military. The Department of Defense and OpenAI said those documents were draft materials incorrectly provided to The Intercept, and that the final contract included no such provision.
(In 2024, The Intercept sued OpenAI in federal court over the company’s use of copyrighted articles to train its chatbot ChatGPT. The case is ongoing.)
The contractual coziness with the world’s most powerful military indicates just how far the artificial intelligence industry has strayed from its earlier public commitments to safety and global prosperity. OpenAI, originally founded as a nonprofit “to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” up until two years ago explicitly banned “military and warfare” use in its terms of service. The following year Google reversed a similar self-imposed ban on using its state-of-the-art AI services for surveillance or “technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people.”
Both companies are now eagerly landing slices of the nearly trillion-dollar Pentagon budget, and for opportunities to augment the killing power of a military that has recently bombed schoolgirls in Iran and civilian vessels in the Caribbean.
Goodfriend, the researcher, said the contracts illustrate the illusory nature of values statements published by these labs. “In recent months companies like Anthropic and Open AI have maintained ‘firm red lines’ when it comes to developing autonomous weapons systems and mass surveillance tools” long after they signed contracts to build “autonomous systems” for the military, she said.
“All this indicates these labs and their personnel have been far more closely integrated into DOD AI development than previously understood and casts some doubt on the supposed contractual limits they have intended to place on the DoD’s use of these systems,” Goodfriend said.
Anthropic, Google, and xAI did not provide comment or answer questions about their respective contracts. In a statement to The Intercept, OpenAI spokesperson Nate Evans said “Our tools are built to support legitimate national security work — including vital cyber defense efforts — while refusing uses that cross the red lines we publicly announced. These restrictions are also reflected in our signed agreement: no use of OpenAI technology for mass domestic surveillance, to direct autonomous weapons systems, or for high-stakes automated decisions. We will continue to work closely with the Department to make sure our AI tools are deployed responsibly and safely.”
On the long timeline of American warfare, these artificial intelligence tools are in their infancy. The Pentagon’s use of artificial intelligence in the process of killing, however, is not a hypothetical. In March, the Wall Street Journal reported that despite Hegseth’s ban, U.S. Central Command used Anthropic’s large language model services to execute its bombardment of Iran, including for “target identification.”
“The same technology we saw autonomously hacking websites on the open internet weeks ago is being used to inform DoD decision-making.”
Despite the intimacy of technology firms and military using it to pinpoint airstrikes, it’s unclear what oversight, if any, these companies have over their own weaponized software once it is in the Pentagon’s hands. When asked if his company’s tools were used in an American airstrike on the first day of the Iran war that killed 120 Iranian schoolchildren, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Bloomberg News he simply did not know. An August 24 report from the New York Times detailed the use of fully autonomous drones guided by machine learning software running on chips made by Nvidia, whose processors have helped make the explosive growth of Anthropic and OpenAI possible. The full extent of the U.S. tech sector’s involvement in killing abroad remains obscured behind trade secrecy and national security considerations.
“The same technology we saw autonomously hacking websites on the open internet weeks ago is being used to inform DoD decision-making,” said Vivian Dong of Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology. “The public deserves insight into how and under what constraints the Department is using this technology.”
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