Anthropic bid $100 million for the Pentagon's drone swarm project, but was not selected. The project was awarded to the SpaceX and OpenAI teams.

According to 1M AI News, earlier this year, Anthropic submitted a proposal to participate in the Pentagon's $100 million Orchestrator Prize Challenge, aiming to develop voice-controlled autonomous drone swarm technology. The competition, led by the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group under the Special Operations Command and the Defense Innovation Unit, is structured in five phases, progressing from software development to live-fire testing, with later stages involving "target perception and sharing" and "from launch to effects." Anthropic's proposal, centered around Claude, translates commander intent into digital commands to coordinate drone swarms, without autonomous targeting or weapon decisions, with human oversight throughout. The company also proposed a joint research project with the Pentagon to securely develop and assess autonomous weapons capabilities.

Anthropic believed that its proposal did not cross its "no participation in fully autonomous weapons" red line, as humans could still monitor and terminate the system at any time. However, Anthropic was ultimately not selected, with the reason unconfirmed by Bloomberg. Selected proposals include a joint proposal from SpaceX and xAI, as well as two defense tech companies listing OpenAI as an AI partner (one being a contractor for autonomous military vehicles, Applied Intuition). OpenAI's technology will be used for the "task control" phase to help translate voice commands into digital instructions. Just hours after the Pentagon announced a prohibition on its contractors engaging in any commercial activities with Anthropic last Friday, OpenAI announced a new agreement with the Department of Defense to use its AI tools on a classified cloud system. Anthropic declined to comment. (Bloomberg)