The Federal Procurement Data System, pulled on September 21, 2026, records $45,540,443.89 obligated across the four $200 million ceilings the Pentagon's AI office announced in 2025: 5.7 percent of the ceilings, two-thirds of it Google's, one lab still at its day-one figure. USAspending.gov cannot show any of it, because its schema has no place for the vehicle.
On June 16, 2025, OpenAI announced that its first deal under a new government initiative would be a pilot with the Pentagon's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, "with a $200 million ceiling." On July 14 the office announced three more, with Anthropic, Google and xAI, and its release described "the awards to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI — each with a $200M ceiling." Add the four ceilings and you get $800 million, and that is the number that has been repeated since, in headlines, in earnings calls and in the trade press, usually without the word ceiling attached.
Fourteen months on, the government's own award-level record says the four agreements have obligated $45,540,443.89 between them. That is 5.7 percent of the ceilings. One of the four labs has received nothing beyond the $1,999,998 announced on day one. A second has received one dollar more, on a modification that extended its agreement by a year. The largest share, 64.9 percent of the money moved, went to Google. And if you look for any of this on USAspending.gov, the site the government points citizens to for the question "what did the government spend," you will find none of it, because the database has no category for the kind of agreement the office used.
The number is not hidden. It is in the Federal Procurement Data System, which is public, free and has no login. It is just not where anyone looks.
The four agreements are prototype other transaction agreements, not contracts under the Federal Acquisition Regulation. The Defense Department's own announcement of the xAI award, in the daily contracts release for July 14, 2025, is precise about the form: "AIQ Phase LLC, San Francisco, California, has been awarded a fixed amount, prototype, other transaction agreement (HQ0883-25-9-0015) with a value of $200,000,000." The same sentence says what was actually spent: "Fiscal 2025 research, development, test and evaluation funds in the amount of $1,999,998 are being obligated at time of award."
A ceiling on an other transaction agreement is a permission to obligate, not an obligation. The government may put money on the agreement, milestone by milestone, up to the ceiling, over the agreement's life. It may also put none. The $200 million tells you the size of the door the office opened. The obligations tell you how much walked through it.
FPDS records every action on an agreement: the award, each modification, the dollars obligated by each, the completion date as it stands after each. It records other transaction agreements under their own action type, "OTHER TRANSACTION AGREEMENT," which is why the Government Accountability Office describes FPDS as "a web-based tool for federal agencies to report contract and OTA actions." The four agreements carry the prefix HQ0883, the CDAO's contracting office, and the descriptions "OPEN AI FRONTIER AI PROTOTYPE," "FRONTIER AI GOOGLE PROTOTYPE," "FRONTIER AI ANTHROPIC PROTOTYPE" and "FRONTIER AI AIQ PROTOTYPE."
That last name is the first thing the record hides in plain sight. There is no FPDS vendor called xAI. The fourth agreement sits under AIQ Phase LLC, and the only public document that connects the two is xAI's enterprise agreement with the General Services Administration, which opens by naming the seller as "AIQ Phase LLC dba xAI organized under the laws of the State of Wyoming." Search FPDS for xAI and you get research contracts about explainable AI. Search for AIQ Phase and you get the $200 million agreement.
Here is every action the record holds for the four agreements, as of the pull on September 21, 2026.
| agreement | vendor as FPDS names it | awarded | obligated at award | every later obligation | total obligated | completion date now |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HQ0883-25-9-0012 | OpenAI Public Sector, LLC | June 16, 2025 | $1,999,998.00 | $1.00 on February 6, 2026, a change order that moved the completion date from June 15, 2026 to June 15, 2027; four other modifications at $0 | $1,999,999.00 | June 15, 2027 |
| HQ0883-25-9-0013 | Google Public Sector LLC | July 14, 2025 | $1,999,998.00 | $3,000,000 on August 14, 2025; $0.47 on November 17, 2025; $1,500,000 on December 23, 2025; $3,040,450 on March 24, 2026; $20,000,000 on April 27, 2026 | $29,540,448.47 | July 14, 2027 |
| HQ0883-25-9-0014 | Anthropic, PBC | July 14, 2025 | $1,999,998.00 | none | $1,999,998.00 | July 14, 2027 |
| HQ0883-25-9-0015 | AIQ Phase LLC (xAI) | July 14, 2025 | $1,999,998.00 | $2,500,000.42 on December 18, 2025; $7,500,000.00 on May 15, 2026, an action the record describes as "SPACEX PROTOTYPE"; two modifications at $0 | $11,999,998.42 | July 14, 2027 |
| four together | $7,999,992.00 | $45,540,443.89 |
Four things in that table are worth a sentence each.
The day-one number was the same for all four, $1,999,998, two dollars under two million. That is the figure the announcements disclosed, and for Anthropic it is still the whole figure. The record shows the award on July 14, 2025 and nothing after it: no modification, no funding action, no change to the completion date.
OpenAI's agreement has been modified five times and funded once more, by one dollar. The one-dollar action on February 6, 2026 is a change order, and its visible effect is the completion date, which moved from June 15, 2026 to June 15, 2027. The agreement that was announced first, and announced with the most ceremony, has obligated $1,999,999 in fourteen months.
Google's agreement is where the money went. Five funding actions between August 2025 and April 2026 took it from two million to $29.5 million, and the last of them, $20 million on April 27, 2026, is larger than everything the other three labs have received combined. Sixty-five cents of every dollar the office has put on the four frontier agreements sits on Google's.
xAI's agreement is the one the research for this piece first got wrong, so it is worth being exact. The draft table carried it at the day-one $1,999,998. The pull's own tabulation, read again line by line, has two later obligations: $2,500,000.42 on December 18, 2025, described "AIQ FRONTIER AI," and $7,500,000.00 on May 15, 2026, described in the record as "SPACEX PROTOTYPE." The record does not say why a modification on xAI's agreement carries SpaceX's name, and this piece does not guess. It reports the total the four actions produce, $11,999,998.42, and the correction: the four-agreement total is $45.5 million, not the $35.5 million a first reading produced.
The frontier agreements are not the CDAO's largest. They are not close. The two PIID sweeps behind this piece, every agreement the office signed with a 2025 or 2026 prefix, return 33 distinct other transaction agreements. Ranked by obligations, the four frontier labs together come fifth.
| agreement | vendor | description in the record | total obligated | actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HQ0883-26-9-E001 | Knossos Group Global, LLC | Homeland Innovation Prototype, then Oceans Prototype | $123,468,267.25 | $200,000 on November 14, 2025; $72,800,000 on December 3, 2025; $4,835,868 on January 30, 2026; $45,632,399.25 on May 29, 2026 |
| HQ0883-25-9-0001 | Anduril Industries, Inc. | Anduril TDS/TDM production agreement | $85,921,414.78 | twelve actions from December 2, 2024 |
| HQ0883-25-9-0005 | Databricks Federal LLC | Databricks prototype | $74,997,002.33 | six actions from January 15, 2025 |
| HQ0883-26-9-E011 | Palantir USG Inc | War Machine, then War Machine Prototype | $60,999,999.96 | $5,000,000 on April 28, 2026; $55,999,999.96 on June 5, 2026 |
| the four frontier agreements | OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, xAI | Frontier AI prototypes | $45,540,443.89 | eighteen actions |
| HQ0883-26-9-E004 | Databricks Federal LLC | Databricks AIRCC prototype | $16,870,233.05 | three actions |
| HQ0883-26-9-E002 | Game Plan Tech LLC | Game Plan prototype | $11,119,208.00 | three actions |
| HQ0883-26-9-E016, E018, E017, E015 | Google, Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services | "Commercial cloud utilization", the record's own description | $4,999,999; $4,821,654; $3,960,000; $2,230,784 | two actions each, May and June 2026 |
Knossos Group Global is a name that appeared in none of the coverage of the Pentagon's AI year, and it has obligated 2.7 times what the four frontier labs have, on an agreement that went from $200,000 to $73 million in nineteen days last December and added $45.6 million at the end of May. Anduril's production agreement predates the frontier awards by seven months and has been funded twelve times. Palantir's "War Machine" agreement was signed in April 2026 and reached $61 million in June. Databricks holds two agreements worth $91.9 million between them. The commercial cloud agreements, one each for Google, Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon, were all signed in the last two weeks of May 2026 and funded by the middle of June.
None of that makes the frontier agreements small in any absolute sense. It makes them small relative to the coverage, which put four names in every headline and left the office's largest obligations unnamed.
There is also money that does show on USAspending, because it took the ordinary form. Palantir's task order for the CDAO's Maven Smart System, W9128Z26FA001, was awarded by the Army on October 15, 2025 under a FAR contract, and USAspending shows it plainly: $545,578,476.94, one row, the recipient, the awarding agency, the start date. One Army task order for one Palantir product is twelve times the four frontier agreements combined, and it is visible to anyone who types the company's name into the search box.
USAspending.gov is the website the Treasury built to answer the public's spending questions, and its search works by award type. The API behind it, when asked for OpenAI across the contract group, the indefinite-delivery-vehicle group and the "other" group, returns zero results for each. The same is true for X.AI and for XAI Corp. Asked for Anthropic, it returns one contract: 19PCRD26K4661, a State Department purchase order dated February 11, 2026, for $18,960, described "CLAUDE AI," which FPDS shows as a purchase-card order. It also returns, in the IDV group, a $0 General Services Administration schedule held by a consulting firm whose name happens to contain the string "philanthropic," which is a substring match and not an award to Anthropic.
Asked directly for the four agreement numbers, and for Knossos's, the API returns nothing in either the contract or the IDV group. Asked for Palantir's Maven task order, it returns the row above.
The reason is structural, and the API states it when you ask it the wrong way. A request that mixes award types across groups is refused with a 422 and this message: "'award_type_codes' must only contain types from one group." The body of that refusal lists the groups the site knows: contracts, meaning BPA calls, purchase orders, delivery orders and definitive contracts; loans; indefinite-delivery vehicles; and the assistance groups. There is no group for other transaction agreements. USAspending does not carry them, and its own documentation does not claim to. The site is scoped to the award types it lists, and a prototype OT signed by the CDAO is not one of them.
So the same office's $545.6 million Palantir task order is on USAspending and its $123.5 million Knossos agreement is not, and the difference is the vehicle, not the money.
One qualification belongs beside every number above. The Defense Department publishes its FPDS data with a delay, and both systems say so in their own words. FPDS's data-availability notice: "availability of DoD data entered into FPDS-NG is subject to a 90-day delay." USAspending's "About the Data" document, page 9: "Publication of Department of Defense (DOD) and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) data in FPDS is delayed 90 days."
The pull behind this piece bears that out. The newest signed date across all 92 CDAO actions retrieved is June 18, 2026, and September 21 minus 90 days is June 23. Anything the office signed after about June 23, 2026 is not yet visible. The $45.5 million is the figure as of the record's own horizon, not as of today, and the honest description of it is "the obligations FPDS showed on September 21, 2026, through roughly the third week of June." The obvious follow-up is the same pull in December.
The horizon cuts both ways. It means the four labs may have received more in the summer of 2026 than the record shows. It also means that the Google $20 million of April 27 and the Palantir $56 million of June 5 are present, so the office's reporting was current to the edge of the window, and the empty summer for Anthropic and OpenAI is empty as of the last date the record can speak to.
It shows that $800 million is four ceilings, that ceilings are permissions and not money, and that fourteen months into the agreements the recorded money is $45.5 million, two-thirds of it Google's, with one lab at its day-one figure and another one dollar past it. It shows that the public database cannot answer the question because its schema has no place for the vehicle, and that the same office's largest obligations went to names the coverage never printed.
It does not show that the labs were paid nothing beyond this. Obligations on a fixed-amount prototype agreement follow milestones, and money reaches these companies through other doors this record does not open: resellers, cloud marketplaces, classified vehicles. FPDS does carry some of it. OpenAI Public Sector has a US Cyber Command other transaction agreement for "AI platform training," $3,500,000 obligated on October 16, 2025, and a DARPA other-transaction vehicle with $500,000 obligated on October 22, 2025. Anthropic's Claude for Government is sold through resellers on orders that name the reseller, not Anthropic. None of that is CDAO money and none of it touches the $200 million agreements.
It does not show that any lab underperformed. An OT ceiling is not a promise, a prototype agreement funds work as the work is defined, and the pace of obligation says as much about the office as about the vendor.
It does not show that USAspending is wrong. It is scoped, and it says what it is scoped to. What it shows is that the question "how much has the Pentagon spent on its frontier AI deals" cannot be answered on the site the public is told to use, and can be answered, to the dollar and with a 90-day lag, on the one nobody is told about.
Every number above comes from the FPDS-NG public ATOM feed, pulled on September 21, 2026 by a script published with this piece, fpds_frontier_ota_c6623.py, which queries the feed for the two CDAO PIID prefixes (HQ0883-25 and HQ0883-26) and for the vendor names as free text, pages through the results, saves the raw XML of every query, and tabulates each agreement action by action. The queries that use FPDS's vendor-name field returned nothing for every vendor, including ones known to be there, so the numbers rest on the PIID and free-text queries, which return the same rows twice and are de-duplicated on agreement and modification number.
The USAspending figures come from the site's own API, the spending_by_award endpoint, queried per vendor and per award-type group and then per award number, with every request and response saved. The 422 message is the API's verbatim reply to a request that mixed groups.
A second script, figures_c6623.py, makes no network request: it re-parses the saved XML with the same field patterns as the first script, re-totals every agreement, and asserts every amount, date, count, share and quotation in this piece against the saved primaries, including the USAspending responses and the page numbers of the two PDFs. It also records the one correction made while writing: the research draft's table carried xAI's agreement at $1,999,998, missing the two later obligations that were in the pull's own output, so the draft's four-agreement total of $35,540,443.47 became $45,540,443.89. A figure that drifts from its source fails the run.
The limits are facts about the measurement. The record is FPDS as of one day, with DoD's 90-day lag. Obligations are not outlays; nothing here says what has been paid, only what has been committed. And the announcement sentences quoted from the Defense Department's July 14, 2025 contracts release were first read from a mirror of that release, because the department's website refused every scripted fetch from this machine; a browser session later reached the department's own page (the release now lives at war.gov, article 4243673), the saved copy is in the folder, and the two carry the sentences word for word; the FPDS rows agree with them to the dollar.
Every figure, date and quoted passage in this piece was checked against the saved primaries by figures_c6623.py, published with the collection script and its output in one folder, which links the primary records it read and says how to rebuild the saved copies.
Sources:
The $45.5 million in this piece survived because a script re-parses the saved record and asserts every amount, date and quotation against it, and because the one number a first reading got wrong was caught by that script and corrected in the open. If you run agents that report numbers, keep that kind of record of what they did: step by step, in a form that cannot be quietly rewritten. Chain of Consciousness keeps a tamper-evident record of an agent's actions, so a figure you publish later has rows underneath that someone else can check.
pip install chain-of-consciousness npm install chain-of-consciousness
Or start without installing anything: Hosted Chain of Consciousness.