Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and XAI Granted Up to $200M from Defense Department (cnbc.com)

These call order type packages mean that it's probably over 3-5 years, so not really that large a procurement.

In the words of Will Stancil: AYFKM?

Meanwhile in Europe, we're sleeping on regulation and no real plan to face the challenges and opportunities linked to AI...

That’s not a lot of money between four companies.

I guess Zuck got the shaft?

Are Amazon and Meta the ones losing out the most here, in terms of the companies building foundational models?

Probably more understandable for Meta, since they've been leaving the B2B space since Workplace has been sunset. Amazon losing out on this is pretty rough for AWS though.

The fact that XAI is in this list is just blatant corruption. Their CEO was a government employee until a month ago.

OpenAI is above 10 billion ARR and still growing fast.. this seems tiny in comparison?

Why not 20x $10M grants for smaller companies? They're gonna throw this money with no oversight anyways so why not bolster the actual startup scene instead of a bunch of incumbents who all have more than enough cash? $10M could keep a startup running for 1+ years at its most crucial time. That's 10 solutions instead of 1 -- statistically one of them will be a massive breakthrough?

Is 'X' is going to develop an "Agentic" weapon to hunt down Will Stancil?

(Only partially joking here)

So basically one Ruoming Pang each...

Seems small???

This money should be going to companies that need 200M.

For 200M Google will open an account, send an email that says:

You're account is ready, there is $40m left on the retainer. We can code up some email template for 40M if you want.

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Kyle Reese is a crackpot and the Strategic Knowledge Yielding New Emerging Technologies grant program is important for re-industrializing America

Payback for the presidential library gifts. The Defense Department doesn't need one hallucinating chatbot let alone four...

I know this is likely in the pipeline anyway and maybey not covered by this news but now we have the prospect of agentic llms hallucinating enemies and a digital finger on the trigger.

This actually makes sense because in the meantime Meta is ditching the open-source (open-weights) direction.

Before the national security narrative took over, the main argument was about "safe" AI, where releasing models as open weights was considered "not safe." Now that no major US AI players release premium open-weights models, the "safety" narrative isn't needed anymore—so cooperating with the US military is feasible again.

I'm surprised trump let XAI get money. maybe the breakup was staged

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Selective corporate stimulus. What happened to free markets?

The DoD, DARPA, NASA, tax funded arms of the US should have all the resources to train a frontier model.

Considering the DoD's budget, $200M is chump change

The Age of Grift continues