“It is impossible to assess any safeguards in your company’s agreement with the Department of Defense without seeing the full contract,” wrote Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Anastasia Obis
July 8, 2026 6:29 p.m
4 minutes read
A Senate lawmaker is demanding that the Defense Department and seven technology companies that use their artificial intelligence capabilities on the department’s secret networks disclose the terms of their agreements to better understand what protections the Defense Department is putting in place for the use of AI in the military.
In a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said the department “appears to have made progress in expanding the use of AI across the military while failing to release meaningful information about contractual guardrails to prevent misuse of these tools or communicate to Congress and the public how these tools are being used in the first place.”
In May, the Department of Defense entered into agreements with SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Reflection and Oracle to integrate their AI capabilities into the department’s Impact Level 6 and Impact Level 7 network environments. IL6 is used for storing and processing information classified up to the secret level, while IL7 supports highly restricted data.
In a separate letter to the seven companies, Warren raised concerns that they may have entered into contracts that would give Defense Department and Trump administration officials “freedom to engage in domestic surveillance — including spying on U.S. citizens exercising their legal rights — or to build autonomous weapons systems that have enormous power to make targeting decisions without human intervention.”
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“Ultimately, it is impossible to evaluate any protections and prohibitions in your company’s agreement with the Department of Defense without seeing the full contract, which neither the Department of Defense nor your company has provided,” Warren said.
“Despite previous congressional requests, the Department of Defense has not provided details on the scope or content of the contracts, other than to say that they enable use of the technology on classified systems for any ‘lawful operational purposes,'” it added.
The Massachusetts senator argued that even if the contracts did contain safeguards — such as bans on domestic surveillance or restrictions on the use of autonomous weapons — the language may be too broad or vague to actually prevent the Defense Department from conducting mass surveillance or using lethal autonomous weapons with limited human oversight.
Some experts pointed out that OpenAI’s contract with the DoD, excerpts of which the company released in February, does little to limit the way the Defense Department could use AI, arguing that references to “all lawful purposes” and “applicable law” in the contract “They cannot be relied upon to limit government actions“with no clearly defined contractual restrictions. Another expert said the conditions surrounding mass surveillance were so broad that the government could “drive a truck through.” [them].”
“As long as the department can plausibly demonstrate that its conduct is not ‘unlawful,’ it appears to be free to use your technology in ways that harm civilians and threaten civil liberties,” Warren said.
Lawmakers also asked about the department’s agreement with Reflection AI, a startup that has yet to publicly release an AI model. The company receives financial support from Venture capital firm 1789 Capital, where President Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., is a partner. Warren asked Hegseth about the criteria the Defense Department used to award the contract to Reflection and whether department officials had communicated with Trump Jr. or his representatives about the contract.
When the Defense Department announced it had struck deals with the technology companies, Defense Department officials said The agreements would “prevent AI vendor lock-in and ensure long-term flexibility for the Joint Force.”
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However, The New York Times previously reported that the Defense Department may have used negotiations with the companies to get Anthropic to abandon the program Security concerns regarding military AI use. The Ministry of Defense described Anthropic as a “supply chain risk” after the company rejected the Pentagon’s request to lift two tight contractual restrictions on the Defense Department’s use of its AI models.
“These agreements come amid the U.S. Department of Defense’s ongoing litigation against Anthropic after the company objected to the use of its models for all lawful use cases, which would have removed pre-existing protections that would have prevented its technology from being used to develop fully autonomous weapons and for domestic mass surveillance,” Warren said.
More broadly, Democratic lawmakers have been pushing curb the Pentagon’s use of artificial intelligence in military operations. Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) introduced a bill that would ban the Defense Department from using autonomous weapons to kill a target without human authorization and ban the department from using AI for mass surveillance and launching nuclear weapons. In June, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (DN.Y.) introduced a similar one The invoice. The Senate Armed Services Committee Language restricting military use of AI was included in the 2027 version of the defense policy bill.
Warren asked the Defense Department and companies to provide answers in unclassified form by July 20.
To contact this reporter about recent changes in the federal government, please email anastasia.obis@federalnewsnetwork.com or contact Signal at (301) 830-2747.
https://federalnewsnetwork.com/congress/2026/07/senate-lawmaker-presses-dod-tech-firms-to-disclose-ai-contract-terms/
