On May 1, the Pentagon signed agreements with eight frontier AI labs — SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle — to deploy models on Impact Level 6 and 7 classified networks. Most of the press read it as a defense story or a politics story. Stephen reads it as the procurement playbook most enterprises haven't built yet.

What's covered

• What the Pentagon actually structured on May 1 — eight vendors named, Impact Levels 6 and 7, the $200M Google contract from 2025, the separate $500M Scale AI deal, and Oracle added on the day of the announcement
• Three things the Pentagon got right — multi-vendor sourcing against a single capability scope, use restrictions written into the contract rather than into policy, and an expandable framework rather than a fixed rost ...