The US Department of Defence said on Monday it had awarded contracts of up to $200 million (£149m) to OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and xAI to help speed adoption of AI technology for national security purposes, as the White House seeks to boost the domestic artificial intelligence industry.

The contracts will help the department to develop workflows involving AI agents – semi-autonomous AI bots – that can be used to address national security challenges, the DoD said.

“The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries,” said DoD chief digital and AI officer Doug Matty in a statement.

AI adoption

US government agencies have been taking on more AI tools following a White House order in April promoting the technology.

The administration has also moved to reduce regulation on the sector by repealing a 2023 executive order that mandated data disclosures for AI companies.

Separately on Monday xAI announced a suite of products called Grok for Government making its Grok AI models available to federal, state and local government and national security customers.

The Defence Department last month awarded OpenAI Public Sector a $200m contract to supply artificial intelligence tools for a variety of uses, including frontier AI capabilities for combat scenarios as well as enterprise applications.

The Pentagon had not disclosed any prior work with OpenAI.

Military headsets

The work is to be carried out mostly in the Washington, DC area, the Pentagon said.

The one-year contract followed a deal announced last December in which OpenAI said it would work with defence technology start-up Anduril to deploy AI for national security missions.

Anduril, founded by Oculus VR co-founder Palmer Luckey, has landed several contracts related to Pentagon work, including a deal in February to take over a Microsoft contract under which the software firm had been developing HoloLens headsets for the US Army.