Yesterday in AI: 24 May 2026 — $9B Chip Deal Keeps NSA on Anthropic

TL;DR — White House cleared $9B for spy-agency AI chips and finalized a classified NSA-Anthropic contract, defying the Pentagon’s own blacklist; Google I/O shipped Gemini 3.5 Flash as the new global default with 4x speed and a serverless Managed Agents API; GitHub Copilot drops flat-rate billing for AI Credits on June 1, seven days from now. --- 1️⃣ White House Overrides Pentagon to Secure Anthropic Deal — $9B in AI Chips Approved - What: White House chief of staff Susie Wiles authorized the NSA to keep using Anthropic’s Mythos model and approved a secret $9B chip acquisition, despite the Pentagon having blacklisted Anthropic as a “supply chain risk.” - Why it matters: The Pentagon-Anthropic feud is now fracturing inside the US government itself — the same administration that banned Anthropic from DoD work is quietly writing it a classified contract. - Key number: $9 billion — the emergency chip budget approved for spy agencies to reach frontier AI A chip shortage forced the issue. Intelligence agencies couldn’t run frontier models on classified networks without a new generation of infrastructure built around Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell superchip, which requires dedicated liquid-cooled data centers. The $9B covers that buildout; Congress must still approve the full amount, but $800M is being reprogrammed immediately for rapid capacity deployment. Anthropic has restricted Mythos access to roughly 40 organizations, citing its offensive cyber capabilities. The NSA contract includes a carve-out explicitly prohibiting use on Americans’ data, and drops the “any lawful use” language the Defense Department had demanded. Anthropic sued the Trump administration in March to reverse the Pentagon blacklist after refusing to enable mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons systems. 📎 Arkansas Democrat-Gazettehttps://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2026/may/23/white-house-clears-9b-for-spy-agencies-ai-chips/ · GV Wirehttps://gvwire.com/2026/05/22/white-house-approves-9-bi