Pentagon clears 8 tech firms to deploy their AI on its classified networks

UPDATED 5/1/26 at 1:05 pm: This story was updated to reflect a later announcement from the DoD that Oracle had been added to the list of companies to deploy on classified networks.

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon announced this morning that it has made agreements with eight leading tech firms to deploy their AIs on its classified networks.

An initial press release sent out this morning listed seven firms: Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, SpaceX, NVIDIA and Reflection, a newer startup backed by NVIDIA. Later today, the Pentagon CTO’s office posted on X that “Oracle has officially agreed to join the list of AI companies deploying frontier capabilities on the Department’s classified networks.”

“These agreements accelerate the transformation toward establishing the United States military as an AI-first fighting force and will strengthen our warfighters’ ability to maintain decision superiority across all domains of warfare,” the initial announcement says.

The eight companies’ AIs are now approved for networks classified as Impact Level 6, which refers to networks handling secret data, and Impact Level 7, a semi-official term for the most highly classified systems. It’s the latest expansion of Secretary Pete Hegseth’s push to bring rapidly advancing commercial AI into the Defense Department, building on the standup of the secure but unclassified GenAI.mil platform in December.

“Integrating secure frontier AI capabilities into the Department’s Impact Level 6 (IL6) and Impact Level 7 (IL7) network environments will streamline data synthesis, elevate situational understanding, and augment warfighter decision-making in complex operational environments,” the announcement continues.

Notably absent from the list of firms is Anthropic, whose Claude AI was already in use on classified networks as part of Palantir’s Maven toolkit, but which the administration has tried to ban from government work, leading to a brace of lawsuits. Despite the ban, the secretive National Security Agency is reportedly using Anthropic’s new and not yet publicly available Mythos model, which is said to have significant cyber warfare capabilities.

Pentagon CTO Emil Michael, the under secretary for research & engineering, took a thinly veiled shot at Anthropic when discussing the announcement on CNBC this morning:

“What we’ve learned since we started this effort at the Department of War is that it’s irresponsible to be reliant on any one partner, and we learned that that one partner didn’t really want to work with us in the way we wanted to work with them,” Michael said, using the Trump administration’s new name for the Department of Defense.

“[So] we went out and made sure that we had multiple different providers — both open source, which is a new effort here at the department, and the proprietary model companies and the infrastructure companies like Microsoft and AWS — and got them to agree to sign up to work with us on classified networks to make sure we had diversity of supply.”

The Pentagon announcements did not specify when the AI models would be available on classified networks or how much, if anything, the companies are being paid.