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Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense
- cranberryturkey 1y agoThey are using our satellites against us!
- reliabilityguy 1y agoWho are “us”?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- billyjmc 1y agoI believe it’s an Independence Day movie reference.
- dClauzel 1y ago200 millimetres? That's not a lot.
- greenchair 1y agoWas this thing built for ants? It needs to be much much bigger, at least twice as large.
- stevenpetryk 1y agoNo, it’s 200 millimeter-dollars. Much different unit.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sna1l 1y agohttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-14/pentagon-awards-up-to-200-million-in-contracts-to-xai-openai?srnd=phx-technology https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-14/pentagon-... - they gave up to 200m to OAI, xAI, and Anthropic
- yahoozoo 1y agoAre they doing anything aside from LLMs?
- Argonaut998 1y agoIs this those ethics and safety they were talking about?
- pageandrew 1y agoWhat's unethical about selling to DoD?
- jMyles 1y agoDo 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.
- ghc 1y agoIs it unethical for a drywall installer to accept a contract for a building on a military base?
- int_19h 1y agoDepends. Is that military base Gitmo?
- jMyles 1y agoIt's not unreasonable to take such a position, yes. Look, if you believe that: a) humanity is headed toward sustained peace b) a transition from the current world order to a peaceful one is better done in an orderly and adult fashion ...then yes, at some point we all need to back away from participation in the legacy systems, right down to the drywall. My observation, especially of the younger generations, is that belief in such a future is more common than it has ever been, and it's certainly one I hold.
- ghc 1y agoActions within that system may be unethical: certainly nobody is defending what America did to Cambodia, or countless other war crimes. But you're painting participation in the system as unethical. Therefore, Ukrainians defending their homeland are unethical. Let me reframe what you said in terms of christianity: ---- If you believe that: a) Jesus is our savior b) The salvation of humanity depends on accepting (a) ...then yes, at some point everyone needs to back away from other religious systems, right down to atheism. ---- I'm not trying to make light of what you believe, but framing others' participation in a system you don't believe in as unethical is exactly what leads to oppression of religious minorities and other outsider groups. It's a tactic of religion, not reason.
- etaioinshrdlu 1y agoLLMs 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.
- echelon 1y agoIf 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 1y agoarent 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.
- cynicalpeace 1y agoWhen people ask "how do we fix our government?" I answer "Did you try turning it off and on again?"
- hyperion2010 1y agoImplicitly 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 1y agotrue- 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.
- treetalker 1y agoThere's more than a grain of truth here. I think we're in a Gall's Law situation. The system has evolved to extreme complexity and no longer works as intended because people learned to game the system, which keeps the best people for the job out of the system; emasculates the essential checks and balances; and creates a vicious cycle that adds further complexity and races to the bottom. The (likely) only way to fix things is to treat our history to date as a rough draft and to start over with simple systems that work, evolving only as necessary.
- FredPret 1y ago
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoGreat news! Congrats to Anthropic! I like to see big tech engage with the govt and military.
- systemvoltage 1y agoWhat changed? 2017 HN would be very different on this take.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- layoric 1y agoI agree, feels very LinkedIn sometimes.. that's not a good thing..
- ghc 1y agoAs 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 1y agoI believe you, but also: seems it isn't even worth the bad press for 10-100x less.
- bgwalter 1y agoMisanthropic wants to get the foot in the door, like the others. The majority of people hate chatbots and surveillance is the only viable path. It won't fix the lack of NATO 155mm shells though.
- leakycap 1y ago> The majority of people hate chatbots and surveillance is the only viable path. What are you considering when you formed this opinion? I find myself on the more cautious side of the equation, but AI seems popular even among my non-techy friends and family.
- ghc 1y agoIf you look at most of the research postings from the DoD, they are really looking for LLMs to parse old PDFs and write new reports. Pretty sure they figured out the surveillance thing way before LLMs. I think the reams of documentation that go into something like the construction of a ship is, however, an unsolved problem.
- dmoy 1y agoInitial budget still bigger than a sbir/sttr phase 2 though. Different grant award structure for not-small companies, but my brain also breaks a little bit because anthropic isn't that far above the sbir employee # cap, but the $$ numbers are so big
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- DebtDeflation 1y ago> 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 a plan for doing...something.
- paxys 1y agoSounds about right for defense spending. If there was an actual deliverable the contract would have a couple more zeroes added to it. For context Microsoft was awarded a $22 billion contract for HoloLens headsets for the military, and not a single one made it to use.
- atonse 1y agoWas 22bn handed to MS or was it a 22bn contracting _vehicle_ (a multi-year contract with a spending limit to make future purchasing easier)
- haiku2077 1y agoYou've just described the consulting industry.
- DebtDeflation 1y agoAlso, apparently it's not just Anthropic. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/14/anthropic-google-openai-xai-granted-up-to-200-million-from-dod.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/14/anthropic-google-openai-xai-... Google, OpenAI,and xAI also get $200M each.
- xnx 1y ago
- SXX 1y agoHooray! Now 2x safer killbots from "AI safety and research company".
- AlecSchueler 1y agoWtf I love throw l their products but I'm cancelling my subscription tonight. So annoying as Claude is my far and away the best of the field ime.
- linkage 1y agoAll according to keikaku: https://ai-2027.com/ https://ai-2027.com/ > The Department of Defense (DoD) quietly begins contracting OpenBrain directly for cyber, data analysis, and R&D
- paxys 1y agohttps://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/14/anthropic-google-openai-xai-granted-up-to-200-million-from-dod.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/14/anthropic-google-openai-xai-... > Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI granted up to $200 million for AI work from Defense Department So it is "up to" $200M, and 4 companies are getting it. I get the first 3, but what on earth is xAI providing to the military?