Seven leading artificial intelligence companies have reached deals to deploy their technology in classified Pentagon computer networks, the Defense Department said Friday. The announcement leaves Anthropic — one of the industry’s key players — increasingly isolated as it battles the Trump administration in court over being branded a national security risk by the Pentagon.

“It’s irresponsible to be reliant on any one partner,” Emil Michael, the department’s chief technology officer, told CNBC Friday. “When we learned that one partner didn’t really want to work with us in the way we wanted to work with them, we went out and made sure we had multiple different providers.”

The department said it planned to use AI technology to analyze data and improve decision-making on the battlefield. A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment on the financial terms of the deals.

Defense officials have been trying to push Anthropic aside after a clash over whether the Pentagon would accept restrictions on the use of its Claude model to conduct mass domestic surveillance or power fully autonomous weapons. At the time, defense officials said they could not agree to limits that they viewed as giving a private company a veto over national security decisions and instead demanded the freedom to use the technology for “all lawful purposes.”

But the precise implications of that standard have remained unclear, and the agreements announced Friday include limits on autonomous weapons and surveillance, according to a defense official and a portion of the text reviewed by The Washington Post.

The department says in the agreement that it will agree to follow a Biden-era policy providing for human oversight of weapons systems and to follow laws designed “to ensure full respect for Americans’ rights against unlawful or unauthorized domestic surveillance.”

Many leading AI researchers rallied around Anthropic’s position, but Friday’s announcement shows how other corporate leaders have taken a different path. The deals include Microsoft, Amazon and Google. OpenAI, the maker of the GPT AI model, previously reached a deal with the Pentagon that it said would include safeguards similar to those sought by Anthropic.

(Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, which has a content partnership with OpenAI.)

Even as the new agreements were being finalized, hundreds of Google employees sent a letter to their bosses this week urging them to refuse to let the Pentagon use its AI on classified data. “We want to see AI benefit humanity; not to see it being used in inhumane or extremely harmful ways,” they wrote.

A Google spokeswoman declined to respond to questions about what safeguards it had sought or share details of how it will work with the Pentagon.

Microsoft spokeswoman Kate Frischmann said the company had “constructive conversations” with officials to ensure the agreement “properly protects human oversight of autonomous weapons and the privacy of the American public.”

Amazon Web Services spokesman Tim Barrett said that the company had been committed to working with the military for more than a decade and “we look forward to continuing to support the Department of War’s modernization efforts, building AI solutions that help them accomplish their critical missions.”

Anthropic became the first AI company to work with secret data and to embed in a war-fighting system known as Maven. But talks between the company and the Pentagon became increasingly acrimonious in February.

The Defense Department moved to blacklist Anthropic, calling the company a national security risk. The two sides are continuing to fight in court over the designation.