Pentagon CTO Calls Anthropic’s Mythos A ‘National Security Moment,’ Strikes AI Deals With Nvidia, SpaceX, Others

• Michael added that Anthropic remains a supply chain risk, and different government departments have been given six months or more to transition away from the AI startup’s models, citing the complexity of the process.
• He also stated that the Department of War is adopting open source AI models as an important new vector for the Pentagon.
• Michael noted that the National Security Agency and the Department of Commerce are evaluating all frontier models, including Chinese ones, to understand the bleeding-edge capabilities of AI technology.

The U.S. Department of War’s Chief Technology Officer, Emil Michael, reportedly stated on Friday that Anthropic remains blacklisted, while calling the startup’s Mythos AI model a separate “national security moment.”

During an interview with CNBC, Michael stated that it is irresponsible to rely on a single partner for the Pentagon’s AI requirements, following their experience with Anthropic.

“I think the Mythos issue that’s being dealt with government-wide, not just at Department War, is a separate national security moment where we have to make sure that our networks are hardened up, because that model has capabilities that are particular to finding cyber vulnerabilities and patching them,” Michael said.

He added that Anthropic remains a supply chain risk, and different departments of the government have been given six months or more to transition away from the AI startup’s models, citing the complexity of the process.

Nvidia and Microsoft shares were up nearly 1% in Friday’s pre-market trade, while Amazon and Alphabet’s Class A shares were down nearly 1%.

Michael Warns Of Infiltration By Chinese Open Source Models

Michael stated that the Department of War is adopting open source AI models as an important new vector for the Pentagon.

“Chinese open source models have infiltrated a lot of different companies, and we want to have an American alternative to that,” he said.

He also said that the National Security Agency and the Department of Commerce are evaluating all frontier models, including Chinese ones, to understand the bleeding-edge capabilities of AI technology.

Michael added that, regarding protests by Google employees over the company’s Pentagon deal, fewer than 1% of Googlers have signed the letter. He praised Google leadership for standing its ground and striking a deal with the Pentagon.

Department Of War Strikes Deals With 7 Companies On AI

The Department of War on Friday announced deals with a slew of companies, including Nvidia Corp. (NVDA), SpaceX, OpenAI, Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Alphabet Inc.’s (GOOG, GOOGL) Google, Amazon.com Inc.’s (AMZN) AWS, and Reflection.

“Access to a diverse suite of AI capabilities from across the resilient American technology stack will give warfighters the tools they need to act with confidence and safeguard the nation against any threat,” the Pentagon stated.

Michael added that the DoW will take each model from these companies for its strengths and use it for the use cases it is best suited for.

“Each of these models is trained on somewhat different data. If you look at Google, they have email, YouTube, Nest cameras, and they have different sorts of capabilities. They may all converge over time, but we’re going to use them in the right ways,” Michael said.

He added that the department has already deployed xAI and OpenAI’s models and is benchmarking them against what they used previously.

Pentagon integrated Google’s latest Gemini 3.1 models onto its GenAI.mil platform earlier this week. It stated that more than 1.3 million personnel have used the platform so far, generating tens of millions of prompts and deploying hundreds of thousands of agents over five months.

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