Tuesday, September 22, 2026
Riyadh is the world's eighth-largest military spender and carries the heaviest defence burden of any major spender outside an active warzone. Its East-West pipeline has been struck, the Houthis hold the Bab al-Mandab, and it has said it will hold off on retaliation. The paperwork behind the spending explains the pause better than the spending does.
Contracts obtained through litigation describe four frontier labs each holding Defense Department agreements worth up to $200m, with bidirectional data exchange including model benchmarks and engineers embedded with the military. Procurement usually buys a product. This buys a relationship in both directions.
More than 400 pages of Defense Department contracts with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI were obtained through freedom-of-information litigation. The documents were disclosable when they were signed. What separated them from the public was not classification but the cost of asking twice.
The US Army's acquisition chief spent a day in August on a howitzer production line in Changwon. The more consequential arrangement is in Arkansas, where a Korean firm has a preliminary lease at a US arsenal to build a $1.3bn plant making nitrocellulose and nitroguanidine — the chemistry every artillery shell is built on, and the part America stopped making.
The Pentagon has signed seven-year framework agreements to triple Patriot interceptor output and quadruple THAAD. The dollar figure is not the interesting clause. The guaranteed minimum annual quantity is.