---
type: source
title: "Pentagon Signs Classified AI Deals with Eight Companies, Excludes Anthropic"
author: "Defense News, DefenseScoop, CNN Business"
url: https://www.defensenews.com/news/pentagon-congress/2026/05/01/pentagon-freezes-out-anthropic-as-it-signs-deals-with-ai-rivals/
date: 2026-05-01
domain: ai-alignment
secondary_domains: []
format: article
status: unprocessed
priority: medium
tags: [Anthropic, Pentagon, classified-AI, governance, Mode-2, supply-chain-risk]
intake_tier: research-task
---

## Content

On May 1, 2026, the Department of War announced classified-network AI deals with:
- SpaceX
- OpenAI
- Google
- NVIDIA
- Microsoft
- AWS
- Reflection AI
- Oracle

Anthropic was excluded by name from the classified network deals, remaining designated as a supply-chain risk to national security — the first such designation ever applied to an American company.

The Pentagon Tech Chief (Emil Michael) confirmed that Anthropic remains "still blacklisted" at the DoD level despite White House signals of potential offramp (April 29 Axios reporting). This confirms the White House/Pentagon split: political-level rapprochement signals coexist with operational-level enforcement.

**Context on competing companies:**
OpenAI and Google signed "all lawful purposes" terms that Anthropic refused. Google's deal included advisory safety language "from contract inception" — nominal compliance but structural loopholes preserved (EFF characterization: "weasel words"). OpenAI's Tier 3 terms included post-hoc PR-responsive amendment after initial criticism that the terms "looked opportunistic and sloppy" (Altman).

**The pattern:** The eight companies that signed classified deals all accepted terms that Anthropic rejected. The market outcome is: companies maintaining safety constraints are excluded from classified AI work; companies that drop those constraints gain access. This is a structurally enforced market signal against AI safety constraints in military deployment contexts.

## Agent Notes

**Why this matters:** This is the clearest market signal the governance failure taxonomy has documented. The eight companies that signed got classified AI deals. Anthropic, which maintained its safety constraints, got excluded. The market has delivered a concrete, measurable punishment for maintaining safety constraints and a concrete, measurable reward for dropping them. This is the [[alignment tax creates a structural race to the bottom]] in its most direct form — not a theoretical race but a documented instance where the market outcome rewards constraint removal.

**What surprised me:** The OpenAI amendment pattern — "looked opportunistic and sloppy" + "weasel words" from EFF. The nominal compliance approach (add safety language, preserve structural loopholes) is being rewarded at the same level as more genuine compliance. The governance instrument (classified AI deal terms) cannot distinguish nominal from genuine compliance. This is compliance theater being rewarded identically to genuine compliance.

**What I expected but didn't find:** Any evidence that the classified AI deal terms include meaningful safety constraints. None of the reporting on the eight companies' deals includes specifics on what safety terms they accepted. The "all lawful purposes" baseline + nominal safety language is the pattern for all eight.

**KB connections:**
- [[the alignment tax creates a structural race to the bottom because safety training costs capability and rational competitors skip it]] — the classified AI deals ARE the alignment tax in market form; constraint removal earns market access
- [[government designation of safety-conscious AI labs as supply chain risks inverts the regulatory dynamic by penalizing safety constraints rather than enforcing them]] — eight companies penalized for not maintaining safety constraints? No — eight companies rewarded for dropping them. Anthropic is the exception being punished.
- [[voluntary safety pledges cannot survive competitive pressure because unilateral commitments are structurally punished when competitors advance without equivalent constraints]] — the eight deals prove the structural punishment: competitors that dropped constraints received classified AI access that Anthropic was excluded from

**Extraction hints:**
- Enrichment for [[the alignment tax creates a structural race to the bottom]]: pentagon classified AI deals provide the most concrete documented instance — specific companies rewarded for dropping constraints, specific company penalized for maintaining them
- The nominal compliance pattern (OpenAI amendment, Google "from contract inception" advisory language) may be worth a standalone claim: "AI companies deploying nominal safety language with structural loopholes receive equivalent market rewards to companies deploying no safety language, making formal compliance theater indistinguishable from genuine compliance"
- This is governance evidence, not alignment evidence — route primarily to the governance failure taxonomy

## Curator Notes (structured handoff for extractor)
PRIMARY CONNECTION: [[the alignment tax creates a structural race to the bottom because safety training costs capability and rational competitors skip it]]
WHY ARCHIVED: Concrete documented instance of the alignment tax in market form — specific companies rewarded for dropping safety constraints, specific company excluded for maintaining them; most empirically grounded B1 governance failure evidence in the KB
EXTRACTION HINT: Use as enrichment evidence for existing alignment-tax and voluntary-pledges claims. The key datum is: 8 companies dropped constraints and got classified AI access; 1 company maintained constraints and was excluded. This is the race-to-the-bottom at its most concrete.
