Military AI Policy by Contract: The Limits of Procurement as Governance

(Jessica Tillipman – Lawfare) On Feb. 27, the Pentagon designated Anthropic, the first frontier artificial intelligence (AI) company on U.S. government classified networks, as a supply chain risk to national security, even as the military reportedly continued using Claude in operations in Iran. President Trump then directed every federal agency immediately to cease all use of Anthropic’s technology, effectively resulting in a government-wide exclusion. Simultaneously, OpenAI reached a deal with the Pentagon and then publicly announced amendments to key terms on social media after facing backlash. Although the public debate has framed this as a fight over whether the Pentagon or Silicon Valley controls military AI, the deeper problem is structural: a procurement framework carrying questions it was never designed to answer, and a policy posture that is dismantling the governance infrastructure that might have answered them. Though the problem is not new, the Anthropic-Pentagon-OpenAI standoff has added a new urgency. – Military AI Policy by Contract: The Limits of Procurement as Governance | Lawfare