Pentagon CTO Emil Michael: Anthropic is still blacklisted, but Mythos is a separate issue

Well, what we've learned since we started this effort at the Department of War is that it's irresponsible to be reliant on any one partner. And we learned that that one partner didn't really want to work with us in the way we wanted to work with them. We went out and made sure that we had multiple different providers, both open source—which is a new effort here at the department—and the proprietary model companies and the infrastructure companies like Microsoft and AWS, and got them to agree to sign up to work with us on classified networks to make sure we had diversity of supply, we had the best of the best, and we had multiple different paths with open source and proprietary.

Yeah, that's right. They're not on the list. Basically, no, we don't have confusion because what we do is we try to take each model for its strengths and use it in those particular use cases. Each of these models is trained on somewhat different data. If you look at Google, you know, they have email, YouTube, Nest Cams, they have a different sort of capabilities. They may all converge over time, but we're going to use them in the right ways. And we've already deployed SpaceX's AI and OpenAI, and we're benchmarking that against what we've had previously. And then open source is a brand new vector for us, which is very important because Chinese open source models have infiltrated a lot of different companies. We want to have an American alternative to that. As it relates to the Google message, I think it was less than 0.1% of their employees wrote a letter. But thanks to the leadership there that learned from the lessons of 2018 with Maven, serving the US government and being a partner of the US government is really important. And they were proud about that, and I'm proud that they stood up and agreed to work with us in the way that makes sense for us.

Yeah. With Anthropic, their supply chain risk, we've given the different department components six months to transition off. If there's some exceptions, you know, we'll make them because the complexity of integrating into some of these networks is really high. That being said, I think the Mythos issue that's being dealt with government-wide, not just the Department of 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 cyber—finding cyber vulnerabilities and patching them. And from a national security standpoint, you always have to look at those things. NSA and Commerce evaluates all frontier models, including Chinese frontier models, to see what the capabilities are at the edge.