Anthropic Is Partnering up with Amazon AWS & Palantir to Offer AI Services to the US Defense Department

On Thursday, AI firm Anthropic announced that it is teaming up with data analytics firm Palantir and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer AI services to U.S. intelligence and defense agencies. 

For now, these agencies will have access to the Claude 3 and 3.5 family of models which became available on Palantir’s platform, supported by AWS hosting, earlier this month. 

Palantir’s defense-accredited environment, Palantir Impact Level 6 (IL6), makes this collaboration crucial for the defense ministry to safely use Anthropic’s AI tools.

For those who don’t know, the Defense Department’s IL6 is a storage and processing area reserved for systems that contain crucial data of national importance and hence require maximum protection from tampering and unauthorized access. Mostly, top government and military secrets fall under this category.

What Do the Companies Have to Say About This?

We’re proud to be at the forefront of bringing responsible AI solutions to U.S. classified environments, enhancing analytical capabilities and operational efficiencies in vital government operations.

– Kate Earle Jensen (Anthropic’s head of sales)

The company believes that this partnership will immensely help the military process vast amounts of data rapidly and securely which in turn will boost its overall intelligence analysis and decision-making processes. 

Identifying patterns, streamlining resource-based tasks, and reviewing documents will also become quite easy.

Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer of Palantir also said something similar and added that the company is proud to be the first in its industry to bring Claude to classified environments.

Dave Levy, VP, of Worldwide Public Sector, AWS shared similar sentiments and emphasized how this collaboration will enable them to offer more advanced AI services and foster growth and innovation across the public sector.

This news closely follows Meta’s recent announcement about making its AI model Llama available for the US government and military. Many tech giants such as Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM have joined hands with Meta to offer a full-scale AI service to authorities. 

However, this doesn’t mean that Anthropic is trying to follow in Meta’s footsteps. In fact, it has been trying to establish itself in the public sector for quite some time now. 

For example, this summer it partnered up with Amazon AWS’s GovCloud to make Claude’s services available to public-sector users. 

Over the past few quarters, AI firms are increasingly trying to work with government agencies, and on the flip side, authorities too are interested in leveraging AI to improve their operations. 

In fact, an analysis done by the Brookings Institute in March 2024 revealed a 1,200% growth in AI-related government contracts. And although defense-related agencies have been more skeptical in the beginning about this technology, it looks like they are slowly opening up.