Google has won a contract valued up to $200 million with the US Department of Defense's (DoD) Chief Digital and Intelligence Office (CDAO) to provide infrastructure for AI.

OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI have also been awarded contracts with a $200m ceiling.

Under the contract with Google Public Sector, the DoD can access Google's cloud infrastructure, including its tensor processing units (TPUs) for AI, and will have access to Google's entire Contiguous United States (CONUS) infrastructure for AI.

Google has previously worked with the US Navy, Air Force, and Defense Innovation Unit, and its Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) and air-gapped version have recently received DoD Impact Level 6 authorization.

The contracts with OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI will also help the DoD scale up the adoption of advanced AI capabilities, with the CDAO noting it will enable the department to develop agentic AI workloads to address critical national security challenges.

“The adoption of AI is transforming the department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries,” said chief digital and AI officer, Doug Matty. “Leveraging commercially available solutions into an integrated capabilities approach will accelerate the use of advanced AI as part of our joint mission essential tasks in our warfighting domain as well as intelligence, business, and enterprise information systems.”

Commenting on the deal, Anthropic's head of public sector, Thiyagu Ramasamy, said: "This award opens a new chapter in Anthropic’s commitment to supporting US national security, which is where our earliest federal deployments began more than a year ago. We look forward to deepening our collaboration across the Department to solve critical mission challenges through our technical expertise, products like our Claude Gov models and accredited Claude for Enterprise offerings, and leadership in safe and responsible AI.”

OpenAI previously also won a $200m contract with the DoD to create "prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains."

Meanwhile, on July 14, xAI announced a suite of products called Grok for Government, which makes its AI models available to federal, local, state, and national security customers.

Grok caused controversy recently when it began spouting antisemitic tropes and referred to itself as MechaHitler, after it was tweaked by xAI to be less "politically correct." xAI founder Elon Musk has since said that Grok was "manipulated" and "too compliant to user prompts."