The War Department has added OpenAI's ChatGPT Mil and xAI's Grok for Government to GenAI.mil, the internal portal it launched in December 2025 with Google Cloud's Gemini for Government. The platform is aimed at more than 3 million military members, civilian employees and contractors. Anthropic's Claude is not on it.
What clearing IL5 does and does not mean
The department's releases say each model has cleared Impact Level 5. IL5 is the highest authorisation for environments built to store and process non-public, sensitive unclassified data. It is a hosting and compliance classification, not access to classified networks — which is what headlines about "military AI" tend to imply.
The number that isn't there
No contract value appears in either announcement. This is a deployment onto an existing portal plus an authorisation, not a procurement with a disclosed ceiling. Anyone converting this into a dollar figure is inventing one; the department has separately announced arrangements with AWS, Microsoft, Nvidia and Reflection AI, and those are different instruments.
What the common framing gets wrong about Anthropic
The absence of Claude is widely read as a lab walking away from defence work. The actual dispute is narrower and it is live in court. Anthropic was designated a supply-chain risk roughly six months ago; the underlying disagreement concerns limits the company places on mass surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons. A federal judge recently described the department's conduct as illegal and baseless — but that is an interim ruling in ongoing litigation, not a final judgment, and it has not put Claude back on the portal.
Why three vendors and not one
A department official framed the choice as access to "a diverse suite of AI capabilities from across the resilient American technology stack". In procurement terms, running three frontier models on one authorised portal keeps switching costs low and prevents any single lab from becoming load-bearing for 3 million users. It also means a lab's usage policy — not its model quality — is now a commercial variable at this scale, which is the genuinely new thing here.