Scale AI Signs $100M, Five-Year Enterprise AI Deal with Pentagon's CDAO

Details

• Scale AI has entered into a five-year enterprise agreement with the Department of Defense's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO), with a contract ceiling of $100 million.
• This marks a shift from 2.5 years of prototype collaborations to an operational, production-scale deployment across the DoD.
• The agreement is structured as an Other Transaction Authority (OTA) contract, facilitating faster procurement and flexibility.
• It grants DoD components secure access to Scale AI's technologies—including Scale Data Engine, GenAI Platform, and Donovan—on networks classified up to Top Secret/SCI.
• This move follows CDAO’s separate $200 million ceiling deals with other AI leaders such as Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI for frontier model development, positioning Scale as a key infrastructure and platform provider.

Impact

Scale AI's new enterprise contract highlights its growing strategic role as the DoD deepens the integration of AI across classified defense operations. While other tech giants landed larger model contracts, Scale's focus on secure infrastructure addresses the government’s critical demand for robust, production-ready AI platforms. This underscores the Pentagon's dual-track approach to both AI R&D and operational deployment.