The acrimonious breakup between Anthropic and the Department of Defense played out largely in public.
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breakup → play → 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.
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that → hinge → contract
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.
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Intercept → conduct → Anthropic
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.
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that → illuminate → crisis
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.
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documents → redact → 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.
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companies → agree → 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.
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prototypes → aim → 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.
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Intercept → set → 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.
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Goodfriend → show → 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.”
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engineers → ’ → surveillance
Official announcements following the 2025 deals were light on details and heavy on platitudes.
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announcements → follow → 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.
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Parnell → equip → 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.
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company → enable → technology
The contract documents for the prototyping project paint a clearer picture, revealing deals that involve far more than a simple sale of software.
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that → paint → software
An “information sharing” provision in all four agreements, for instance, creates a two-way exchange of data and expertise.
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provision → create → data
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.
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companies → agree → 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.”
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which → approve → 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.”
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capabilities → provide → 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.”
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companies → pledge → 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.
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Google → offer → States
These briefings would be conducted in both unclassified and classified settings.
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briefings → conduct → 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.”
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Tech → entail → applications
One document notes that Google, for example, would lead multiple seminars on “responsible AI” deployment.”
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Google → note → 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.
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engineers → state → 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.
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Pentagon → hop → 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.
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products → schedule → 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.
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contracts → have → developments
“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.”
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that → help → 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.
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this → tell → 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.
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Khlaaf → point → place
“This is a very concerning development,” she said.
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she → say → ?
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.
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forecasts → accord → scenarios
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.
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companies → serve → companies
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.”
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labs → trust → consequences
As the prototyping effort progressed, the contract documents show the scope of the project expanded.
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scope → progress → project
New versions of the contract show additional deliverables included in the list of what the Pentagon was purchasing.
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Pentagon → show → what
The government redacted descriptions of these new deliverables on the basis of military secrecy and corporate confidentiality.
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government → redact → secrecy
It was during the negotiation of these subsequent amendments when Anthropic and the Pentagon had their falling out.
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Anthropic → have → falling
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.
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Hegseth → refuse → judge
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.
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they → reach → networks
…and 61 more, not listed.
