The US Department of Defense’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) handed out contracts worth up to $200 million to AI players Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI to develop agentic AI workflows across a range of critical mission areas.

While the exact amount of each contract is not available, the agency stated each will have a ceiling of $200 million.

The CDAO stated the partnerships will broaden the Department of Defense’s use and experience in frontier AI capabilities and increase the ability of the “companies to understand and address critical national security needs with the most advanced AI capabilities US industry has to offer”.

“Leveraging commercially available solutions into an integrated capabilities approach will accelerate the use of advanced AI as part of our Joint mission essential tasks in our warfighting domain as well as intelligence, business, and enterprise information systems,” stated Doug Matty, who leads the CDAO.

It is also partnering with the General Services Administration (GSA) to bring “the best AI technologies to the federal government while leveraging whole-of-government buying power for AI production and compute resources”.