The Pentagon's New AI Chatbot Store Has Room for Everyone Except Claude

The Pentagon spent this week proving that winning in court and getting invited to the table are two different things. Its official AI store now offers troops and staff a choice of chatbots from OpenAI and xAI. Claude, the model built by the company that just beat the Pentagon in federal court, is not one of the options. Elsewhere the money kept moving fast. An AI sales startup nearly doubled its valuation in nine months, and a Chinese AI lab closed in on a war chest ahead of a public listing. India had a better week with its own numbers: the economy grew faster than almost anyone had forecast.

The Pentagon’s new AI store has room for everyone but Claude

The Department of Defense launched GenAI.mil last December as a single portal where staff could use commercial AI tools without separate approval for each one. It started with just one option, Google’s Gemini for Government, and quickly signed up more than 1.7 million users.

This week the portal grew. The Pentagon added Grok for Government, built by Elon Musk’s xAI under its Starshield brand, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT for unclassified military work. Staff can now pick between three major AI systems on one government-approved platform.

Anthropic’s Claude is conspicuously not among them. The company has spent this year fighting the Pentagon in court after refusing an order to strip Claude’s safeguards against fully autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of Americans. The Pentagon responded by labeling Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” a designation normally reserved for security threats, not for a vendor that will not agree to a contract’s terms. A federal judge ruled that designation unlawful in late August, calling it retaliation dressed up as national security. The ruling did not put Claude back on GenAI.mil. The Pentagon simply built its new chatbot store around the company it is still fighting in court, and the company it lost to is nowhere in it.

An AI sales startup nearly doubled its price tag in nine months

Clay, a New York startup that builds AI tools for sales and marketing teams, is raising a new round led by Wellington Management at a valuation of seven billion dollars before the new money lands. That is up from the five billion dollar mark the company hit in January, when it let employees cash out shares in a tender offer led by DST Global.

The pace is what stands out. Clay’s Series C round in August 2025 valued it at 3.1 billion dollars. A tender offer the following spring pushed that to 1.5 billion, January’s tender more than tripled it to five billion, and now Wellington’s round adds another two billion on top of that within roughly seven months. Clay says its revenue grew more than three and a half times over the past year and crossed 100 million dollars in annual recurring revenue in December.

A Chinese AI lab is closing in on a war chest before going public

DeepSeek is nearing a funding round worth about 50 billion yuan, roughly 7.4 billion dollars, that would value the Chinese AI lab at 74 billion dollars before the money arrives. The round reportedly includes China’s national AI investment fund, NetEase, JD.com, and IDG Capital, alongside existing backers like Monolith Management and battery maker CATL.

DeepSeek plans to put the money toward model research and buying more computing power. The company is said to be preparing to file for an initial public offering on Shanghai’s STAR Market, a listing that could come as soon as the end of this year, with shares trading sometime in 2027. If the round closes on the reported terms, DeepSeek would rank among the most valuable AI companies outside the United States, built on a model that unsettled Silicon Valley when it first shipped less than two years ago.

India’s economy grew faster than anyone expected

India’s economy grew 7.8 percent in the April to June quarter compared with a year earlier, according to government data released this week. That beat both the 7.3 percent median forecast from economists surveyed by Bloomberg and the Reserve Bank of India’s own projection of 7 percent.

The growth was not even across every sector. Trade, hotels, transport and communication jumped 12.5 percent, financial and real estate services grew 10.4 percent, and manufacturing grew a steadier 7.3 percent. Agriculture grew just 3.6 percent by comparison. The overall pace is a step down from the prior quarter’s revised 8.6 percent, which was itself an unusually strong number, so this quarter reads less like a slowdown and more like a return to a still fast normal.

For the full financial year that ended in March, India’s economy grew 7.7 percent, its fastest pace since the rebound from the pandemic recession. Coming a day after the country’s foreign currency reserves hit a record high, the numbers point the same way: an economy that keeps outrunning the caution built into most forecasts for it.

Put it together and the week has a shape. The Pentagon built a new AI marketplace and left an empty shelf where its most litigious vendor should sit. Money is still chasing AI companies at a pace that turns a startup’s valuation over in months, whether that startup sells to sales teams in New York or trains models in Hangzhou. And India keeps doing the less dramatic work of beating its own numbers, one quarter at a time.