Anthropic signs a $200mm deal with the Department of Defense
47 comments
·July 14, 2025etaioinshrdlu
LLMs are a key enabling technology to extract real insights from the enormous amount of surveillance data the USA captures. I think it's not an understatement to say we are entering a new era here!
Previously, the data may have been collected, but there was so much that effectively, on average no one was "looking" at it. Now it can all be looked at.
schmidtleonard
I remember when PRISM was spooky. This is gonna be something else!
andai
I call it One Fed Per Child...
ezst
NLP was a thing decades before LLMs and deep learning. If one thing, LLMs are a crazy inefficient and costly way to get at it. I really doubt this has anything to do with scaling.
lucaspauker
It is way better now though...
autoexec
and hallucinated about.
moomoo11
Even the best LLM can't even process a 50 line CSV with like 2+ columns properly.
echelon
If you think about LLMs as new types of databases, it's quite obvious that they'll start winning over many types of legacy systems.
They ingest unstructured data, they have a natural query language, and they compress the data down into manageable sizes.
They might hallucinate, but there are mechanisms for dealing with that.
These won't destroy actual systems of record, but they will obsolete quite a lot of ingestion and search tools.
ericmcer
arent they complete trash as a database? "Show me people who have googled 'Homemade Bomb' in the last 30 days". For returning bulk data in a sane format it is terrible.
If their job was to process incoming data into a structured form I could see them being useful, but holy cow it will be expensive to in realtime run all the garbage they pick up via surveillance through an AI.
jMyles
So what are the actions which represent our duties to resist?
* End-to-end encryption (has downsides with regard to convenience)
* Legislation (very difficult to achieve, and can be ignored without the user having a way to verify)
* Market choices (ie, doing business only with providers who refrain from profiteering from illicit surveillance)
* Creating open-weight models and implementations which are superior (and thus forcing states and other malicious actors to rely on the same tooling as everyone else)
* Wholesale deprecation of legacy states (seems inevitable, but still possibly centuries off)
What am I missing? What's the plan here?
ghc
As someone whose has been part of a company that has "signed" one of these large deals before, let me tell you that it doesn't mean the DoD is giving these companies $200M. If one of the companies is wildly successful, sure. But none of it is guaranteed money and the initial budget is likely 10-100x smaller than the cap.
leakycap
I believe you, but also: seems it isn't even worth the bad press for 10-100x less.
sna1l
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-14/pentagon-... - they gave up to 200m to OAI, xAI, and Anthropic
Alifatisk
I appreciate your comment, the post title makes it seem like it's Anthropic only!
paxys
Seen many variations of this title shared today. The actual one is:
> Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI granted up to $200 million for AI work from Defense Department
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/14/anthropic-google-openai-xai-...
So it is "up to" $200M, and 4 companies are getting it.
Argonaut998
Is this those ethics and safety they were talking about?
pageandrew
What's unethical about selling to DoD?
int_19h
Anthropic specifically are the people who talk about "model alignment" and "harmful outputs" the most, and whose models are by far the most heavily censored. This is all done on the basis that AI has a great potential to do harm.
One would think that this kind of outlook should logically lead to keeping this tech away from applications in which it would be literally making life or death decisions (see also: Israel's use of AI to compile target lists and to justify targeting civilian objects).
kadushka
Why do you think humans would make better life or death decisions? Have we never had innocent civilians killed overseas by US military as a result of human error?
leakycap
I hear where you are coming from, but if an AI company is going to be in this field, wouldn't you want it to be the company with as many protections in place as possible to avoid misuse?
We aren't going to stop this march forward, no matter how much it is unpopular it will happen. So, which AI company would you prefer be involved with DOD?
henry2023
This is satire. right?
jMyles
Do you really not know? It's a difficult question to answer in an HN thread, because on one hand, it requires a review of the history of empire and war profiteering. But on the other hand, it's just obvious to the point of being difficult to even articulate.
gk1
What you’re describing is the result of the issue being complicated, not obvious.
ridiculous_leke
Not invalidating your concerns but don't see a strong reason to not do it considering that every other nation is going to leverage this tech.
kadushka
If you live in US, taxes you pay directly fund DoD. So if you sponsor their activities, why can't Anthropic do business with them? Which other company would you rather get their (your) money?
ghc
Is it unethical for a drywall installer to accept a contract for a building on a military base?
null
2OEH8eoCRo0
While I was in the Marines I never killed anyone but I did render humanitarian assistance. Talk about doing the opposite of what I signed up for!
In the very least it's complicated.
dClauzel
200 millimetres? That's not a lot.
greenchair
Was this thing built for ants? It needs to be much much bigger, at least twice as large.
stevenpetryk
No, it’s 200 millimeter-dollars. Much different unit.
dClauzel
That is a new hybrid freedom unit. Nice!
mxfh
millimillions? So thats 200,000 Dollars? Did a LLM write this?
null
2OEH8eoCRo0
Great news! Congrats to Anthropic! I like to see big tech engage with the govt and military.
systemvoltage
What changed? 2017 HN would be very different on this take.
yahoozoo
Are they doing anything aside from LLMs?
MarkusQ
Yeah, grifting. In fact, that's what the article's about.
cynicalpeace
When people ask "how do we fix our government?"
I answer "Did you try turning it off and on again?"
hyperion2010
Implicitly assuming that there is some well defined state that can be recovered when turning it back on. That's not how the real world works, and historically what revolutionaries fail to fully realize is that the trajectory out of a period without government is extremely unlikely to wind up in the state that they desire, much less one that was "stored" or "defined" by a set of per-existing laws.
cynicalpeace
true- the only "revolution" that I'm familiar with that was mostly successful is the American Revolution and even that is probably a misnomer.
Rather than a call for revolution, my comment was a joke- given the technical bent of this forum.
Because turning things off/on again actually works for so many bugs lol
If we could actually do it- it would actually look something like idealized DOGE. Terminate all contracts. Fire everyone minus the absolutely essential employees. Or at least the employees that can't even send an email (minus NOCs?)
Then slowly build back until it needs to be done over again.
This contract seems like another grift. Hopefully I'm wrong.
cranberryturkey
They are using our satellites against us!
> With CDAO and other DOD organizations and commands, we'll engage in:
- Working directly with the DOD to identify where frontier AI can deliver the most impact, then developing working prototypes fine-tuned on DOD data
- Collaborating with defense experts to anticipate and mitigate potential adversarial uses of AI, drawing on our advanced risk forecasting capabilities
- Exchanging technical insights, performance data, and operational feedback to accelerate responsible AI adoption across the defense enterprise
>
What exactly is the government getting for $200M? From the above, it sounds like it will be a management consulting style Powerpoint deliverable containing a list of use cases, some best practices and insights, and plan for doing...something.