Arlington, VA –
Today, the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) announced contract awards to leading U.S. frontier AI companies to accelerate Department of Defense (DoD) adoption of advanced AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges. Frontier AI companies lead development of the most advanced AI models and technologies, conduct insightful research into the use of frontier AI, and pioneer efforts to address both the potential benefits and risks of frontier AI technologies.
The awards to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI – each with a $200M ceiling – will enable the Department to leverage the technology and talent of U.S. frontier AI companies to develop agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas. Establishing these partnerships will broaden DoD use of and experience in frontier AI capabilities and increase the ability of these companies to understand and address critical national security needs with the most advanced AI capabilities U.S. industry has to offer.
“The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries,” said Chief Digital and AI Officer Dr. Doug Matty. “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.”
DoD is implementing a commercial-first approach to accelerating DoD adoption of AI. Today’s awards bring in the best U.S.-based frontier AI talent to help apply cutting-edge AI to solve DoD use cases. CDAO is also providing access to many of the latest generative AI (GenAI) models for general purpose use to Combatant Commands, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Joint Staff via Army’s Enterprise Large Language Model Workspace powered by Ask Sage, and to the broader enterprise via embedded AI models within DoD enterprise data and AI platforms, including the Advancing Analytics (Advana) platform, Maven Smart System, and Edge Data Mesh nodes, which enable AI integration into workflows that occur within these data environments themselves. Finally, DoD is 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.
About the CDAO
The CDAO mission is to accelerate DoD adoption of data, analytics, and AI from the boardroom to the battlefield. CDAO exercised its organic acquisition authority to issue the awards announced today, demonstrating that DoD acquisition can move at the speed of emerging technology and operational necessity.
For more information about the CDAO, please visit our website at www.ai.mil. You can also connect with the CDAO on LinkedIn (@DoD Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office) and X, formally known as Twitter (@dodcdao).