The Pentagon just handed a $200M AI contract to a company TechCrunch says is unequipped to handle national security responsibilities. I've spent 16 years watching government agencies pick vendors. This is what happens when urgency overrides due diligence.
Transportation agencies figured this out decades ago. Public-private partnerships use a slow, structured interview process to select design-build teams precisely because the cost of picking the wrong vendor is catastrophic. The DoD just skipped that entire playbook to move fast on AI.
When a government agency is under pressure to move fast, vetting goes out the window. The contract gets awarded to whoever says yes first, compliance conditions get stripped and the ethical guardrails get negotiated away. The agency gets what it needs today and inherits the risk tomorrow.
Anthropic walked away because they understood the weight of it. OpenAI walked in because the money was right. The real question nobody is asking: can OpenAI actually build a model capable of handling national security operations at the level this requires? It appears the military has just bet hundreds of millions on the answer being yes.
