Pentagon Picks Seven, Anthropic Sits Out: Sunday Briefing, May 3, 2026
The first weekend of May reshapes the procurement map and the agent map at the same time. The Pentagon's May 1 classified-network deals went to seven vendors — AWS, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, SpaceX, and Reflection — with Anthropic notably absent after prior DoD engagement. Stanford's 2026 AI Index puts agent success on real computer tasks at 66% (up from 12% a year ago), and MCP has crossed 97 million installs with every major provider shipping compatible tooling. Google committed up to $40B to Anthropic at a $380B valuation with Anthropic's run-rate now ~$30B. Colorado's AI Act takes effect on June 30 — about eight weeks out — and Gemini 3.1 Ultra (2M-token context) plus Flash-Lite at $0.25/M tokens resets frontier-tier economics for high-volume use cases.