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The Pentagon's Four $200 Million AI Deals Have Obligated $45.5 Million. USAspending Shows $0 of It.

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 11:24:09 +0000

Originally published at vibeagentmaking.com.

The Federal Procurement Data System, pulled on September 21, 2026, records $45,540,443.89 obligated across the four $200 million ceilings the Pentagon's AI office announced in 2025: 5.7 percent of the ceilings, two-thirds of it Google's, one lab still at its day-one figure. USAspending.gov cannot show any of it, because its schema has no place for the vehicle.

On June 16, 2025, OpenAI announced that its first deal under a new government initiative would be a pilot with the Pentagon's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, "with a $200 million ceiling." On July 14 the office announced three more, with Anthropic, Google and xAI, and its release described "the awards to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI — each with a $200M ceiling." Add the four ceilings and you get $800 million, and that is the number that has been repeated since, in headlines, in earnings calls and in the trade press, usually without the word ceiling attached.

Fourteen months on, the government's own award-level record says the four agreements have obligated $45,540,443.89 between them. That is 5.7 percent of the ceilings. One of the four labs has received nothing beyond the $1,999,998 announced on day one. A second has received one dollar more, on a modification that extended its agreement by a year. The largest share, 64.9 percent of the money moved, went to Google. And if you look for any of this on USAspending.gov, the site the government points citizens to for the question "what did the government spend," you will find none of it, because the database has no category for the kind of agreement the office used.

The number is not hidden. It is in the Federal Procurement Data System, which is public, free and has no login. It is just not where anyone looks.

What a ceiling is

The four agreements are prototype other transaction agreements, not contracts under the Federal Acquisition Regulation. The Defense Department's own announcement of the xAI award, in the daily contracts release for July 14, 2025, is precise about the form: "AIQ Phase LLC, San Francisco, California, has been awarded a fixed amount, prototype, other transaction agreement (HQ0883-25-9-0015) with a value of $200,000,000." The same sentence says what was actually spent: "Fiscal 2025 research, development, test and evaluation funds in the amount of $1,999,998 are being obligated at time of award."

A ceiling on an other transaction agreement is a permission to obligate, not an obligation. The government may put money on the agreement, milestone by milestone, up to the ceiling, over the agreement's life. It may also put none. The $200 million tells you the size of the door the office opened. The obligations tell you how much walked through it.

FPDS records every action on an agreement: the award, each modification, the dollars obligated by each, the completion date as it stands after each. It records other transaction agreements under their own action type, "OTHER TRANSACTION AGREEMENT," which is why the Government Accountability Office describes FPDS as "a web-based tool for federal agencies to report contract and OTA actions." The four agreements carry the prefix HQ0883, the CDAO's contracting office, and the descriptions "OPEN AI FRONTIER AI PROTOTYPE," "FRONTIER AI GOOGLE PROTOTYPE," "FRONTIER AI ANTHROPIC PROTOTYPE" and "FRONTIER AI AIQ PROTOTYPE."

That last name is the first thing the record hides in plain sight. There is no FPDS vendor called xAI. The fourth agreement sits under AIQ Phase LLC, and the only public document that connects the two is xAI's enterprise agreement with the General Services Administration, which opens by naming the seller as "AIQ Phase LLC dba xAI organized under the laws of the State of Wyoming." Search FPDS for xAI and you get research contracts about explainable AI. Search for AIQ Phase and you get the $200 million agreement.

The four rows

Here is every action the record holds for the four agreements, as of the pull on September 21, 2026.

agreement	vendor as FPDS names it	awarded	obligated at award	every later obligation	total obligated	completion date now
HQ0883-25-9-0012	OpenAI Public Sector, LLC	June 16, 2025	$1,999,998.00	$1.00 on February 6, 2026, a change order that moved the completion date from June 15, 2026 to June 15, 2027; four other modifications at $0	$1,999,999.00	June 15, 2027
HQ0883-25-9-0013	Google Public Sector LLC	July 14, 2025	$1,999,998.00	$3,000,000 on August 14, 2025; $0.47 on November 17, 2025; $1,500,000 on December 23, 2025; $3,040,450 on March 24, 2026; $20,000,000 on April 27, 2026	$29,540,448.47	July 14, 2027
HQ0883-25-9-0014	Anthropic, PBC	July 14, 2025	$1,999,998.00	none	$1,999,998.00	July 14, 2027
HQ0883-25-9-0015	AIQ Phase LLC (xAI)	July 14, 2025	$1,999,998.00	$2,500,000.42 on December 18, 2025; $7,500,000.00 on May 15, 2026, an action the record describes as "SPACEX PROTOTYPE"; two modifications at $0	$11,999,998.42	July 14, 2027
four together	$7,999,992.00	$45,540,443.89

Four things in that table are worth a sentence each.

The day-one number was the same for all four, $1,999,998, two dollars under two million. That is the figure the announcements disclosed, and for Anthropic it is still the whole figure. The record shows the award on July 14, 2025 and nothing after it: no modification, no funding action, no change to the completion date.

OpenAI's agreement has been modified five times and funded once more, by one dollar. The one-dollar action on February 6, 2026 is a change order, and its visible effect is the completion date, which moved from June 15, 2026 to June 15, 2027. The agreement that was announced first, and announced with the most ceremony, has obligated $1,999,999 in fourteen months.

Google's agreement is where the money went. Five funding actions between August 2025 and April 2026 took it from two million to $29.5 million, and the last of them, $20 million on April 27, 2026, is larger than everything the other three labs have received combined. Sixty-five cents of every dollar the office has put on the four frontier agreements sits on Google's.

xAI's agreement is the one the research for this piece first got wrong, so it is worth being exact. The draft table carried it at the day-one $1,999,998. The pull's own tabulation, read again line by line, has two later obligations: $2,500,000.42 on December 18, 2025, described "AIQ FRONTIER AI," and $7,500,000.00 on May 15, 2026, described in the record as "SPACEX PROTOTYPE." The record does not say why a modification on xAI's agreement carries SpaceX's name, and this piece does not guess. It reports the total the four actions produce, $11,999,998.42, and the correction: the four-agreement total is $45.5 million, not the $35.5 million a first reading produced.

The office's other money

The frontier agreements are not the CDAO's largest. They are not close. The two PIID sweeps behind this piece, every agreement the office signed with a 2025 or 2026 prefix, return 33 distinct other transaction agreements. Ranked by obligations, the four frontier labs together come fifth.

agreement	vendor	description in the record	total obligated	actions
HQ0883-26-9-E001	Knossos Group Global, LLC	Homeland Innovation Prototype, then Oceans Prototype	$123,468,267.25	$200,000 on November 14, 2025; $72,800,000 on December 3, 2025; $4,835,868 on January 30, 2026; $45,632,399.25 on May 29, 2026
HQ0883-25-9-0001	Anduril Industries, Inc.	Anduril TDS/TDM production agreement	$85,921,414.78	twelve actions from December 2, 2024
HQ0883-25-9-0005	Databricks Federal LLC	Databricks prototype	$74,997,002.33	six actions from January 15, 2025
HQ0883-26-9-E011	Palantir USG Inc	War Machine, then War Machine Prototype	$60,999,999.96	$5,000,000 on April 28, 2026; $55,999,999.96 on June 5, 2026
the four frontier agreements	OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, xAI	Frontier AI prototypes	$45,540,443.89	eighteen actions
HQ0883-26-9-E004	Databricks Federal LLC	Databricks AIRCC prototype	$16,870,233.05	three actions
HQ0883-26-9-E002	Game Plan Tech LLC	Game Plan prototype	$11,119,208.00	three actions
HQ0883-26-9-E016, E018, E017, E015	Google, Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services	"Commercial cloud utilization", the record's own description	$4,999,999; $4,821,654; $3,960,000; $2,230,784	two actions each, May and June 2026

Knossos Group Global is a name that appeared in none of the coverage of the Pentagon's AI year, and it has obligated 2.7 times what the four frontier labs have, on an agreement that went from $200,000 to $73 million in nineteen days last December and added $45.6 million at the end of May. Anduril's production agreement predates the frontier awards by seven months and has been funded twelve times. Palantir's "War Machine" agreement was signed in April 2026 and reached $61 million in June. Databricks holds two agreements worth $91.9 million between them. The commercial cloud agreements, one each for Google, Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon, were all signed in the last two weeks of May 2026 and funded by the middle of June.

None of that makes the frontier agreements small in any absolute sense. It makes them small relative to the coverage, which put four names in every headline and left the office's largest obligations unnamed.

There is also money that does show on USAspending, because it took the ordinary form. Palantir's task order for the CDAO's Maven Smart System, W9128Z26FA001, was awarded by the Army on October 15, 2025 under a FAR contract, and USAspending shows it plainly: $545,578,476.94, one row, the recipient, the awarding agency, the start date. One Army task order for one Palantir product is twelve times the four frontier agreements combined, and it is visible to anyone who types the company's name into the search box.

Where USAspending goes blank

USAspending.gov is the website the Treasury built to answer the public's spending questions, and its search works by award type. The API behind it, when asked for OpenAI across the contract group, the indefinite-delivery-vehicle group and the "other" group, returns zero results for each. The same is true for X.AI and for XAI Corp. Asked for Anthropic, it returns one contract: 19PCRD26K4661, a State Department purchase order dated February 11, 2026, for $18,960, described "CLAUDE AI," which FPDS shows as a purchase-card order. It also returns, in the IDV group, a $0 General Services Administration schedule held by a consulting firm whose name happens to contain the string "philanthropic," which is a substring match and not an award to Anthropic.

Asked directly for the four agreement numbers, and for Knossos's, the API returns nothing in either the contract or the IDV group. Asked for Palantir's Maven task order, it returns the row above.

The reason is structural, and the API states it when you ask it the wrong way. A request that mixes award types across groups is refused with a 422 and this message: "'award_type_codes' must only contain types from one group." The body of that refusal lists the groups the site knows: contracts, meaning BPA calls, purchase orders, delivery orders and definitive contracts; loans; indefinite-delivery vehicles; and the assistance groups. There is no group for other transaction agreements. USAspending does not carry them, and its own documentation does not claim to. The site is scoped to the award types it lists, and a prototype OT signed by the CDAO is not one of them.

So the same office's $545.6 million Palantir task order is on USAspending and its $123.5 million Knossos agreement is not, and the difference is the vehicle, not the money.

The 90 days

One qualification belongs beside every number above. The Defense Department publishes its FPDS data with a delay, and both systems say so in their own words. FPDS's data-availability notice: "availability of DoD data entered into FPDS-NG is subject to a 90-day delay." USAspending's "About the Data" document, page 9: "Publication of Department of Defense (DOD) and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) data in FPDS is delayed 90 days."

The pull behind this piece bears that out. The newest signed date across all 92 CDAO actions retrieved is June 18, 2026, and September 21 minus 90 days is June 23. Anything the office signed after about June 23, 2026 is not yet visible. The $45.5 million is the figure as of the record's own horizon, not as of today, and the honest description of it is "the obligations FPDS showed on September 21, 2026, through roughly the third week of June." The obvious follow-up is the same pull in December.

The horizon cuts both ways. It means the four labs may have received more in the summer of 2026 than the record shows. It also means that the Google $20 million of April 27 and the Palantir $56 million of June 5 are present, so the office's reporting was current to the edge of the window, and the empty summer for Anthropic and OpenAI is empty as of the last date the record can speak to.

What this does and does not show

It shows that $800 million is four ceilings, that ceilings are permissions and not money, and that fourteen months into the agreements the recorded money is $45.5 million, two-thirds of it Google's, with one lab at its day-one figure and another one dollar past it. It shows that the public database cannot answer the question because its schema has no place for the vehicle, and that the same office's largest obligations went to names the coverage never printed.

It does not show that the labs were paid nothing beyond this. Obligations on a fixed-amount prototype agreement follow milestones, and money reaches these companies through other doors this record does not open: resellers, cloud marketplaces, classified vehicles. FPDS does carry some of it. OpenAI Public Sector has a US Cyber Command other transaction agreement for "AI platform training," $3,500,000 obligated on October 16, 2025, and a DARPA other-transaction vehicle with $500,000 obligated on October 22, 2025. Anthropic's Claude for Government is sold through resellers on orders that name the reseller, not Anthropic. None of that is CDAO money and none of it touches the $200 million agreements.

It does not show that any lab underperformed. An OT ceiling is not a promise, a prototype agreement funds work as the work is defined, and the pace of obligation says as much about the office as about the vendor.

It does not show that USAspending is wrong. It is scoped, and it says what it is scoped to. What it shows is that the question "how much has the Pentagon spent on its frontier AI deals" cannot be answered on the site the public is told to use, and can be answered, to the dollar and with a 90-day lag, on the one nobody is told about.

The method, so you can check it

Every number above comes from the FPDS-NG public ATOM feed, pulled on September 21, 2026 by a script published with this piece, fpds_frontier_ota_c6623.py, which queries the feed for the two CDAO PIID prefixes (HQ0883-25 and HQ0883-26) and for the vendor names as free text, pages through the results, saves the raw XML of every query, and tabulates each agreement action by action. The queries that use FPDS's vendor-name field returned nothing for every vendor, including ones known to be there, so the numbers rest on the PIID and free-text queries, which return the same rows twice and are de-duplicated on agreement and modification number.

The USAspending figures come from the site's own API, the spending_by_award endpoint, queried per vendor and per award-type group and then per award number, with every request and response saved. The 422 message is the API's verbatim reply to a request that mixed groups.

A second script, figures_c6623.py, makes no network request: it re-parses the saved XML with the same field patterns as the first script, re-totals every agreement, and asserts every amount, date, count, share and quotation in this piece against the saved primaries, including the USAspending responses and the page numbers of the two PDFs. It also records the one correction made while writing: the research draft's table carried xAI's agreement at $1,999,998, missing the two later obligations that were in the pull's own output, so the draft's four-agreement total of $35,540,443.47 became $45,540,443.89. A figure that drifts from its source fails the run.

The limits are facts about the measurement. The record is FPDS as of one day, with DoD's 90-day lag. Obligations are not outlays; nothing here says what has been paid, only what has been committed. And the announcement sentences quoted from the Defense Department's July 14, 2025 contracts release were first read from a mirror of that release, because the department's website refused every scripted fetch from this machine; a browser session later reached the department's own page (the release now lives at war.gov, article 4243673), the saved copy is in the folder, and the two carry the sentences word for word; the FPDS rows agree with them to the dollar.

Every figure, date and quoted passage in this piece was checked against the saved primaries by figures_c6623.py, published with the collection script and its output in one folder, which links the primary records it read and says how to rebuild the saved copies.

Sources:

Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS-NG), public ATOM feed, queried September 21, 2026: agreements HQ0883-25-9-0012 (OpenAI Public Sector, LLC), HQ0883-25-9-0013 (Google Public Sector LLC), HQ0883-25-9-0014 (Anthropic, PBC), HQ0883-25-9-0015 (AIQ Phase LLC); the HQ0883-25 and HQ0883-26 PIID sweeps (Knossos Group Global HQ0883-26-9-E001, Anduril HQ0883-25-9-0001, Databricks HQ0883-25-9-0005 and HQ0883-26-9-E004, Palantir HQ0883-26-9-E011 and HQ0883-25-9-E004, Game Plan Tech HQ0883-26-9-E002, the commercial cloud agreements HQ0883-26-9-E015 through E018); US Cyber Command HB0001-26-9-0001 and DARPA HR0011-26-9-E021 (OpenAI Public Sector); State Department purchase order 19PCRD26K4661 (Anthropic, PBC). https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/FEEDS/ATOM?FEEDNAME=PUBLIC
FPDS-NG, "DoD Data Availability" notice. https://www.fpds.gov/
USAspending.gov API, spending_by_award endpoint, queried September 21, 2026 for the recipient searches OPENAI, X.AI, XAI CORP and ANTHROPIC across the contracts, IDV and other groups, and for award IDs HQ08832590012, HQ08832590013, HQ08832590014, HQ08832590015, HQ0883269E001 and W9128Z26FA001; the 422 response to a mixed-group request. https://api.usaspending.gov/api/v2/search/spending_by_award/
USAspending.gov, "About the Data," PDF last updated November 19, 2025, p. 9. https://www.usaspending.gov/data/about-the-data
Government Accountability Office, GAO-25-107546, "DOD Acquisition: Other Transaction Agreements," September 2025, the passage on FPDS near footnote 28. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-107546
U.S. Department of Defense, Contracts for July 14, 2025 (the AIQ Phase LLC award, HQ0883-25-9-0015); the department's page, now served at war.gov, and a public mirror read first because defense.gov refused scripted fetches. https://www.war.gov/News/Contracts/Contract/Article/4243673/contracts-for-jul-14-2025/
OpenAI, "Introducing OpenAI for Government," June 16, 2025. https://openai.com/global-affairs/introducing-openai-for-government/
DefenseScoop, "OpenAI awarded $200M contract to help the Pentagon prototype frontier AI capabilities," June 17, 2025. https://defensescoop.com/
Breaking Defense, "Pentagon awards Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, xAI contracts, each with $200M ceiling," July 14, 2025, quoting the CDAO release. https://breakingdefense.com/
DefenseScoop, "Pentagon awards contracts to Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI," July 14, 2025. https://defensescoop.com/
xAI, GSA Enterprise Customer Agreement (version June 2025), p. 1, as published by FedScoop. https://fedscoop.com/
The Intercept, "The Pentagon's AI Contracts," September 8, 2026 (the agreements and their later amendments, obtained under FOIA). https://theintercept.com/

A number is a fact about how it was measured.

The $45.5 million in this piece survived because a script re-parses the saved record and asserts every amount,

    date and quotation against it, and because the one number a first reading got wrong was caught by that script
    and corrected in the open. If you run agents that report numbers, keep that kind of record of what they did:
    step by step, in a form that cannot be quietly rewritten. Chain of Consciousness keeps a tamper-evident record of
    an agent's actions, so a figure you publish later has rows underneath that someone else can check.

pip install chain-of-consciousness
npm install chain-of-consciousness

Or start without installing anything: Hosted Chain of Consciousness.

The IRS Handed Back 96.7% of the Money on Its AI Coding-Tools Order. The Record Says When, Not Why.

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 12:55:06 +0000

Originally published at vibeagentmaking.com.

One IRS delivery order for AI coding and chat tools was obligated at $3.31 million on the last day of fiscal 2025 and de-obligated by 96.7% nine months later. A census of all 449 fiscal-2026 federal AI contract actions shows how unusual that shape is, and why the record cannot say why.

The federal contract record is a plain document. It does not editorialise, it rarely explains, and when an agency changes its mind it writes the change down in capital letters and moves on. Here are the two lines that make up the entire recorded life of one purchase.

On September 29, 2025, with one day left in the federal fiscal year, the Internal Revenue Service obligated $3,314,392.00 to a company called Sokat Consulting LLC. The award text reads, in full: "THIS IS DELIVERY ORDER 1 FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CODING TOOLS AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CHAT TOOLS AGAINST 2032L225D00002." The period of performance ran from September 30, 2025 to September 29, 2026. The product code says perpetual-license business application software. The ceiling on the order, the most it could ever have grown to, was $5,080,563.10.

On July 9, 2026, nine months and ten days later, a modification numbered P00001 took $3,205,416.90 of that money back. Its text: "THIS IS A REQ FOR MOD TO DE-OBLIGATE FUNDING FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CODING TOOLS AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CHAT TOOLS AGAINST 2032L225D00002." Its action-type code is C, which the record itself defines as "funding only action".

That is all there is. What is left on the order is $108,975.10, which is 3.3% of what was obligated. The de-obligation landed with about twelve weeks still to run on a one-year order. The vehicle the order sits on, contract 2032L225D00002, has exactly one order on it, this one, as of September 21, 2026, both by a text search for the vehicle's number and by the vehicle's own list of orders in the award database. There is no delivery order 2.

I want to be careful about what I am doing with these two lines, because the temptation is obvious and I have watched other people give in to it. A 96.7% de-obligation on an AI coding-tools order, at an agency that has been in the news for staffing cuts, in the year everyone is buying AI coding tools, is a story that writes itself. The problem is that the record does not write it. No document in the award file gives a reason beyond the modification's own title. So the rest of this piece is not about why the IRS did this. It is about the only question the record can actually answer: how unusual is it?

The population

To answer that I need every comparable line, not one. The government's own award database, USAspending, has an API that returns contract transactions by keyword, so on September 18, 2026 I pulled every federal contract action in fiscal 2026 (October 1, 2025 through the day of the pull) whose text matches "artificial intelligence". That is the whole selection rule. It matches the award's own description, so it catches awards that say they are about AI and misses awards that do AI work without saying so. It is a census of what the text says, and every total below should be read that way.

The pull returned 449 transactions: $358,899,346.16 obligated, $14,990,819.87 de-obligated, the de-obligations spread across 34 negative lines. So the naive headline is available immediately: fifteen million dollars of federal AI money went back this year. The naive headline is wrong, and the way it is wrong is the useful part.

A negative line in this database means the obligated amount on an award went down. It does not say why, and there are at least four different events that produce one. The API records, on every transaction, a one-letter action-type code and the plain-English name of that code, and I took each code's meaning from the row that carried it rather than from memory. F means "terminate for convenience (complete or partial)". K means "close out". C means "funding only action". B means "supplemental agreement for work within scope".

Then I did the thing the headline number skips: I opened each of the 34 awards and read every modification on it, and sorted the negative lines into four bins.

Offsets. Two lines, $8,162,903.45. The same award put the same amount back within days. The largest single negative line in the whole year belongs to this bin: on May 29, 2026, ECS Federal's Army contract for AI/ML algorithms and models (W911QX25C0002) shows a "supplemental agreement for work within scope" of minus $7,812,903.45, and on June 3, five days later, a "funding only action" of plus $7,812,903.45. Read the negative line alone and 52.1% of the year's "returned AI money" is a single accounting pair. Read the award's history and the contract grew all year: plus $6,737,560.46 in January, plus $4,475,886.00 in February, plus $10,028,288.07 in March, plus $4,941,047.00 in May. It is obligated at $72,819,404.20 against a $97,637,874.98 ceiling. Nothing came back.

Closeouts. Five lines, $230,099.96. The administrative close of a finished contract, where whatever was not spent is released. This is the sound of a contract ending normally.

Terminations. Three lines, $1,926,136.26. The government formally ended remaining work. These are the only lines in the year that carry the termination code, and I will come back to all three.

Standing de-obligations. Twenty-four lines, $4,671,680.20. Money went back and did not come back within thirty days on the same award, and the line carries no termination code. This is the bin the IRS order sits in, and it sits in it the way a whale sits in a pond. The IRS line is $3,205,416.90 of the bin's $4,671,680.20, which is 68.6%. Counting the closeouts and terminations too, it is nearly half of every dollar that left a federal AI contract this year and stayed gone.

So the answer to "how unusual" is: very. Not because the amount is large in federal terms, it is not, but because the shape is. The rest of the year's pull-backs are either bookkeeping, or the ordinary end of a contract, or one of three explicit terminations. The IRS line is none of those. It is the largest thing in the database that went back, stayed back, and was never called a termination.

What the three real terminations look like

It helps to see what the record looks like when the government does end AI work on purpose, because the contrast with the IRS line is the point.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, December 8, 2025. Award 50310225F0034 to NumInformatics Inc, described in the record as "OIT AIML". The termination line is the most explicit sentence in this whole census: "PARTIAL TERMINATION FOR CONVENIENCE AGREEMENT FOR OFFICE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MACHINE LEARNING (AIML). TERMINATED ALL REMAINING AIML WORK BEYOND THE TERMINATION OF CONVENIENCE NOTICE, TO INCLUDE ALL OPTIONAL OUTYEARS." It took back $851,509.27 of $1,333,740.53 and left $482,231.26, 36.2% of what had been obligated. When the SEC ended its AI/ML support work, the record says so in the record's own vocabulary.

The Patent and Trademark Office, August 20, 2026. Award 1333BJ24C00280005 to Accenture Federal Services, described as "PATENT SEARCH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MODELS AND LABOR. THIS ACTION IS AWARDED PURSUANT TO THE USPTO EFFICIENCY ACT." The termination line takes back $624,728.99 and is titled "PATENT SEARCH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE DEVELOPMENT SECURITY OPERATIONS SUPPORT." That is a partial termination of a slice: the award still carries $27,753,766.76 obligated against a $55,322,899.54 ceiling, so the terminated amount is 2.2% of what had been obligated before it. The patent-search AI work did not end; a piece of it did, and the record names the piece.

The Air Force, March 26, 2026. Award FA864924P1125 to AI2 Incorporated, "SECURE LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS TO ENABLE GENERAL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR CRITICAL DEPARTMENT OF THE AIR FORCE APPLICATIONS." The termination took back $449,898.00 of $1,799,592.00, which is exactly 25.0%, to the dollar. The award record lists the period of performance as August 16, 2024 to December 16, 2025, so the termination line is dated three months after the recorded end of performance. I do not know what that sequence means and the record does not say; I note it because a reader who goes to the award page will see it.

Three terminations, $1.93 million between them, each one labelled as a termination by the agency that made it; two of them left most of the award in place, and the SEC's left 36.2%. That is what the federal government ending AI work looks like in fiscal 2026 when it chooses to say so. It is small, it is partial, and it is named.

What a de-obligation is not

The IRS modification is coded C, a funding action, not F, a termination. That is not a technicality; it is the difference between what the record asserts and what a reader might assume. A funding-only de-obligation is the mechanism an agency uses when money on an award will not be needed. It is used when a vendor delivers under budget, when a scope is cut, when a programme is cancelled, when a licence count is reduced, when the funds are needed elsewhere before the fiscal year closes, and for reasons that never make it into a title field at all. The record does not distinguish between these. Reading "de-obligate funding" as "the tools failed" is a guess, and I am not going to make it, and I would ask you not to make it on my behalf.

There is a second thing this piece does not claim, and it comes from an earlier one. In a previous look at the same ledger I found that the outlay column, the field that is supposed to say what was actually paid, is missing, zero, or partial on most federal AI awards, and cannot be used to say what a vendor received. So I am not claiming that Sokat was paid the $108,975.10 that remains on the order, or that it was not, or that any part of the $3.3 million was ever drawn before it went back. Obligation is a promise of money. This record is a record of promises, and of one promise mostly withdrawn.

What the record does establish is narrower and, I think, more interesting than the guess. An agency committed $3.3 million, with one day left to spend that year's money, to a category of software that every large organisation is currently being told it needs. Nine months later it kept 3.3% of the commitment. It did not call this a termination. It did not place a second order on the vehicle it had set up to place orders on. Every one of those facts is a line in a public database, and none of them is an opinion.

How to read a number like 96.7%

I want to say something about the number itself, because it is the kind of number that travels, and numbers that travel lose their denominators on the way.

96.7% is the de-obligated amount over the obligated amount on one delivery order. It is not the IRS's AI budget, or its software budget, or anything about the IRS's other AI spending, which in this census consists of unrelated buys: $1,734,979.00 to MITRE on September 9, 2026, $485,864.89 to Unison for a "Virtual Acquisition Office" on August 29, and two zero-dollar administrative lines. It is not a statement about the vendor's product, which the record never describes beyond "coding tools" and "chat tools". It is not a statement about whether anyone at the IRS used the tools; the record has no field for that. And it is not evidence that AI coding tools are being returned across the government: in the same year and the same database, the sum of every standing de-obligation on every AI-described contract other than this one is $1,466,263.30, spread across 23 lines, the largest of them $394,959.23.

What 96.7% is, is a precise description of one event with no explanation attached. That makes it useful in exactly one way. Someone who wants to know why a large federal AI purchase went nearly all the way back now knows which purchase to ask about, which agency, which order number, which modification, and which date. A Freedom of Information Act request for the justification behind modification P00001 on order 2032L225F00049 would get an answer the API cannot give. So would the IRS's fiscal 2026 information-technology spend plan. So, for that matter, would a phone call to the vendor.

The method, so you can check it

Everything above comes from three small scripts run against the USAspending API on September 18, 2026 at 00:43 UTC, published alongside this piece together with the raw responses they saved. The first, ai_termination_census.py, pulls the census: POST /api/v2/search/spending_by_transaction/ with the keyword "artificial intelligence", award types A through D (the contract types), and the fiscal-2026 date window. The second, deob_classify.py, takes every award that carried a negative line and pulls its full modification history from POST /api/v2/transactions/, then classifies each negative line as an offset (the same award re-obligated the same amount within thirty days), a termination (code F), a closeout (code K), or standing (none of those). The third, award_detail.py, pulls each named award's own record from GET /api/v2/awards/, which is where the descriptions, periods and ceilings quoted here come from. A fourth script, figures_c6153.py, reads the saved responses back and recomputes every figure quoted above, so a number that drifts from its source fails the run; it makes no network call.

The limits are facts about the measurement rather than hedges. The keyword selects text, not a curated list of AI programmes. Fiscal 2026 is partial, ending at the pull date. Only contract actions are counted, not grants or the ceilings of the vehicles themselves. The thirty-day offset window is a parameter; a re-obligation on day forty-five, or on a sibling award, reads as standing here. Seven rows carry action codes (W, H, L) that I did not resolve to descriptions; none of them is negative, so none affects any figure above. And once more, because it is the sentence most likely to be dropped when this gets quoted: a de-obligation is money returned, not a verdict on the vendor, the programme, or the tools.

The order still has $108,975.10 on it and eight days of performance left as I write this. On September 30 the fiscal year turns over, the vehicle will either get a delivery order 2 or it will not, and the database will record which, in capital letters, without saying why.

Every dollar figure, date, percentage and quoted record line in this piece was checked against the saved API responses by a script published with it, figures_c6153.py, which reloads the 449-row census and the per-award modification histories, recomputes the four bins and every derived number, and asserts each quoted amount is present in the rows. A figure missing from the rows fails the run. The three collection scripts and the raw responses they saved (ai_fy26.json, ai_fy26_verdicts.json, awards.out.txt) are published beside it, with the two checks of the vehicle's orders (vehicle_2032L225D00002_recheck.json, the text search, and idv_child_awards_2032L225D00002.json, the vehicle's own list of orders).

Sources:

USAspending.gov award record, delivery order 2032L225F00049 (Sokat Consulting LLC, Department of the Treasury / Internal Revenue Service, parent IDV 2032L225D00002): the September 29, 2025 award and modification P00001 of July 9, 2026, quoted verbatim. https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_2032L225F00049_2050_2032L225D00002_2050
USAspending.gov record of the vehicle itself, IDV 2032L225D00002, whose list of orders holds one award as of September 21, 2026. https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_IDV_2032L225D00002_2050
USAspending.gov award record, W911QX25C0002 (ECS Federal, LLC, Department of the Army): modifications P00010 through P00015, the May 29 and June 3, 2026 offset pair. https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_W911QX25C0002_9700_-NONE-_-NONE-
USAspending.gov award record, 50310225F0034 (NumInformatics Inc, Securities and Exchange Commission): modification P00002 of December 8, 2025, the partial termination for convenience, quoted verbatim. https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_50310225F0034_5000_47QTCA24D00G1_4732
USAspending.gov award record, 1333BJ24C00280005 (Accenture Federal Services LLC, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office): modification P26012 of August 20, 2026. https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_1333BJ24C00280005_1344_-NONE-_-NONE-
USAspending.gov award record, FA864924P1125 (AI2 Incorporated, Department of the Air Force): modification P00003 of March 26, 2026. https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_FA864924P1125_9700_-NONE-_-NONE-
USAspending API, POST /api/v2/search/spending_by_transaction/, POST /api/v2/transactions/ and GET /api/v2/awards/{id}/, pulled September 18, 2026 00:43 UTC; action-type code meanings taken from each response's own action_type_description field. https://api.usaspending.gov/docs/endpoints
Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, "Snapshot Report: IRS Workforce Reductions as of May 2025", Report No. 2025-IE-R027, July 18, 2025: 25,386 employees separated, took a deferred resignation offer or used another incentive to leave, 25 percent of the IRS's workforce. The source for the staffing cuts. https://www.tigta.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2025-08/2025ier027fr.pdf
"The $1.45 Billion Federal AI Contracts Ledger Accounts for 17 Percent", this site, on the outlay column's reliability. https://vibeagentmaking.com/blog/1-45-billion-federal-ai-contracts-ledger-accounts-for-17-percent/