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One way to avoid the threat surface expansion that comes from integrating AI into your system? Sign a mega contract, backed by the federal government, with AWS.
Sure, that’s not on the table for most of us. But for OpenAI competitor Anthropic and analytics firm Palantir, two companies with government contracts who manage sensitive US data, it’s the next step for ensuring speed and security.
Intensity. The two companies announced their deal with AWS on November 7. The partnership will provide Palantir’s AI Platform (AIP) access to Anthropic’s Claude AI model within the AWS model.
In a joint press release, the companies said the deal was done for “processing vast amounts of complex data rapidly, elevating data driven insights, identifying patterns and trends more effectively, streamlining document review and preparation, and helping US officials to make more informed decisions in time-sensitive situations while preserving their decision-making authorities.”
Speed is also a primary motivator.
“We’ve already seen firsthand the impact of these models with AIP in the commercial sector: for example, one leading American insurer automated a significant portion of their underwriting process with 78 AI agents powered by AIP and Claude, transforming a process that once took two weeks into one that could be done in three hours,” Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar said in a statement.
The torch. Palantir’s AIP operates at Impact Level 6, a security clearance just below top secret, emphasizing the importance of using a secure system like AWS. Not that the service is immune to hacks; a May 2022 data breach resulted in terabytes of personal information being revealed. For a company like Palantir, which is essential to the US military, maintaining the battlefield edge is important—“it is mission-critical to deploy AI technology in [the] battlefield as well as national security,” as a Seeking Alpha analysis put it.
That’s probably why Palantir intends to deploy the tech elsewhere.
“We are now providing this same asymmetric AI advantage to the US government and its allies,” Sankar said.