That’s not a lot of money between four companies.
“The awards to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI – each with a $200M ceiling – will enable the Department to leverage the technology and talent of U.S. frontier AI companies to develop agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas.”
(https://www.ai.mil/Latest/News-Press/PR-View/Article/4242822...)
In theory if it’s just labor with some profit mixed in, then you might be looking at 600 employees for each company.
I doubt it is just labor. Quote says $200 million ceiling. So maybe a time and materials (T&M) contract? It’s a ceiling so it’s not like they earn or are guaranteed $200m.
Has to include token or cloud computing time too. Which Google owns and can amortize themselves since it’s a capital asset to them. I don’t know much about the cloud computing background of Anthropic or if they are using Azure or AWS.
I think my original point is still valid it’s not a lot when you look at it