February 18, 2026 at 7:34 PM
The Pentagon says it’s getting its AI providers on ‘the same baseline’
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (L) walks with Emil Michael (R), under secretary of defense for research & engineering, at the Pentagon, July 16, 2025. Win McNamee / Getty Images By Patrick Tucker Science & Technology Editor February 18, 2026 02:34 PM ET Artificial Intelligence AI & Autonomy Industry PALM BEACH, Fla.—After weeks of back-and-forth with AI company Anthropic, the Pentagon is actively talking with all four major U.S. AI players—Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and xAI—to ensure the companies and the Defense Department are at "the same baseline" regarding Pentagon expectations, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering said Tuesday.
“We actually signed contracts with all four of them over the summer without a lot of specificity,” Emil Michael told a group of venture capital investors during an Amazon Web Services event. “Now we want to deploy [them] on our system so other people can build agents and pilots, and deploy it,” he said. In other words, after months of exercises and experiments, the Pentagon is looking to allow different command elements and business entities to build AI agents that can perform a wider variety of tasks with minimal human oversight.The discussions between Anthropic and the Pentagon have grown increasingly tense.