Yesterday, LASST filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on behalf of The Intercept and reporter Sam Biddle, asking a federal judge to force the Department of Defense to turn over records it has so far refused to produce: the Pentagon’s contracts with the country’s leading artificial intelligence companies.
How we got here
On March 5, 2026, LASST submitted two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the Department of Defense seeking copies of its contracts with major AI companies. You can read our earlier post on the DoD’s response here. FOIA gives agencies 20 working days to respond. More than thirty working days have passed since the Pentagon received our requests, and we have yet to hear a response. Today’s complaint asks the court to force DoD to comply with the FOIA statute and produce the requested contracts on an expedited basis.
Why it matters
Since we filed our FOIA requests, the stakes have only grown. Anthropic is suing the U.S. government for retaliation for policy positions Anthropic took during contract negotiations. Journalists have reported on the Pentagon’s use of AI to help plan military strikes in the conflict with Iran. The Department of Defense is spending enormous amounts of taxpayer dollars on these contracts.
Despite the intense public interest and the scale of expenditure involved, the public has not seen the underlying contract language. All the public has to go off of right now are excerpts of OpenAI’s agreement with the Pentagon posted on its website.
But when public money and national security meet the frontier of a technology this consequential, transparency is not a courtesy. It is the law. We intend to see it enforced.
Expanding beyond the contracts themselves
Last week, we submitted additional FOIA requests on behalf of Sam and The Intercept seeking copies of all communications sent or received on or after January 1, 2024 between DoD and OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and xAI about the contracts we previously requested. The public has a clear interest not only in the contracts themselves, but in the communications that produced them: the meetings, negotiations, and deliberations that led the Pentagon to partner with a small handful of the most powerful private AI companies in the world, boosting some and punishing others.