Google is pushing deeper into defense AI with a new feature that lets Pentagon personnel build custom AI agents directly on the military's enterprise portal. The rollout comes as the search giant's chief AI rival Anthropic takes the Trump administration to court over government contract policies, setting up a clash that could reshape how Silicon Valley sells AI to Washington.
Google just made it dramatically easier for the Pentagon to spin up AI assistants. The company's rolling out a no-code tool that lets civilian employees and service members build custom AI agents directly within the Department of Defense's enterprise AI infrastructure, marking the tech giant's most aggressive push yet into military AI since the controversial Project Maven protests forced the company to retreat in 2018.
The timing couldn't be more charged. While Google embeds itself deeper into defense operations, rival AI powerhouse Anthropic is in federal court battling the Trump administration over what it claims are unfair contracting practices that favor incumbents like Google and Microsoft. The lawsuit, filed earlier this month, alleges the Pentagon created procurement structures that effectively lock out newer AI labs from competing for lucrative government work.
Google's new agent builder sits inside the Pentagon's classified AI portal and targets the thousands of defense workers who need AI assistance but lack technical skills. Think intelligence analysts summarizing classified briefings, logistics officers optimizing supply chains, or personnel managers drafting policy documents. The platform uses Google's Gemini models under the hood, but Pentagon users won't need to understand prompt engineering or model fine-tuning.
"We're democratizing AI deployment within the world's largest organization," one Google Cloud executive told CNBC, speaking on condition of anonymity about the unannounced feature. The tool reportedly went live for select Pentagon units last week, with broader rollout planned for Q2.
