Four big AI players get $200M defense contracts

The Department of Defense’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, or CDAO, on Monday announced it awarded defense contracts, each with a $200 million ceiling, to four frontier AI companies. Anthropic, Google, xAI, and OpenAI all received contracts to develop agentic AI workflows for several different areas of national security missions. Agentic models can complete a variety of tasks and make decisions semi-autonomously, without needing user requests for each step.

CDAO chief Doug Matty said the technology would give American fighters a strategic advantage. His department planned to use AI workflows for warfighting, intelligence, business, and enterprise information systems, he said, according to a CDAO release.

The Defense Department also planned to make AI products available for every government agency to obtain through the General Services Administration, according to the release. The tools include xAI’s Grok for Government.

Why has xAI’s Grok chatbot made headlines recently? The company on Tuesday said it had fixed several issues with the programming of its Grok 4 model. User prompts asking for the bot’s surname led it to scan the internet for an answer, the company said, leading to undesirable responses including references to Hitler. xAI tweaked Grok’s internal prompts and was monitoring the situation, it said.

Dig deeper: Read Elizabeth Russell’s report on what the growth of generative AI may mean for humanity.