The U.S. military will never again rely on just one vendor of AI tools as it did with Anthropic, the defense undersecretary for research and engineering said Thursday.
“We were single-threaded on one vendor, one AI vendor at the Department of War, and to integrate into classified systems is not just putting your software on a public cloud and having it work,” Emil Michael said at the Special Competitive Studies Project’s AI+ Expo event in Washington, D.C. “These are sophisticated, protective systems that take a lot of work to integrate on, so it wasn’t like I could just turn on a few other models that easily. But never again we’ll be single-threaded with any one model.”
Michael said that his department’s recent deals with eight leading AI developers represented a statement of support by a tech industry that not so long ago shied away from military work, as well as a promise to allow the Pentagon to use their tools “for all lawful use cases.”
Anthropic has sued the Defense Department and other federal agencies and their leaders for declaring the company a national-security risk after it declined to allow the Pentagon to use its tools for autonomous weaponry and mass surveillance of Americans. A judge has ordered the White House to stop telling agencies to remove the company’s products as the lawsuit proceeds.
Moreover, a new Anthropic product has drawn the Pentagon’s interest: Mythos Preview, which has shown groundbreaking ability to spot cyber vulnerabilities. The U.S. government has drafted internal policies that would allow agencies to use Mythos.
Michael said that the Anthropic product heralds an era of AI-powered cyber operations.
“The Mythos moment is really a cyber moment, and it’s: ‘How is the U.S. government going to deal with cyber?’” Michael said.
Major tech companies are responding to Michael’s drive to diversify the Pentagon’s vendor portfolio. Rand Waldron, the vice president of the Global Government Sector for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, told Nextgov/FCW that Defense officials are asking cloud service providers like Oracle to prioritize interconnectedness in the effort to avoid vendor lock-in.
“From what I can see, the Department of War has some very savvy people who … don’t want to go all in on one [model] because then six months later, they may need to go all in on another,” Waldron said.
He explained that there will likely be models that are more finely tuned to particular use cases, such as code generation, data analytics, supply chain management or targeting in warfighter operations. One model from a single provider may not effectively serve each of these workflows.
“I don’t believe that all those different use cases will end up being the exact same model at any given time,” Waldron said.
The Pentagon’s desire to expand the service offerings available for its workforce has precedent. Waldron said that DOD and the intelligence community have laid the foundation for a flexible approach to AI services acquisition, citing the creation of the Commercial Cloud Enterprise and Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contracting vehicles as the blueprints for future contracting structure.
“It’s not like they’re trying to replace Anthropic with another model provider,” Waldron said. “They want to replace Anthropic with four model providers.”
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