Reuters reports Google has joined the Pentagon’s classified AI stack and agreed to a contract that can adjust safety settings at government request. The harder question is no longer whether labs work with defense agencies, but how much control they keep after deployment.
OpenAI published details of its Department of War agreement on February 28, 2026 and added a clarifying update on March 2. The company says the deal is cloud-only, keeps humans in the loop, forbids domestic surveillance of U.S. persons, and bars autonomous-weapons direction and other high-stakes automated decisions.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei confirmed in a CBS interview that the company built custom Claude models for the U.S. military that have revolutionized military capabilities. The classified-cloud-deployed model is 1-2 generations ahead of the publicly available Claude.