President Trump on June 5 signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 11, titled “Artificial Intelligence in the National Security Enterprise,” ordering the Pentagon and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to accelerate adoption of frontier A.I. systems and rescinding the Biden administration’s 2024 framework, National Security Memorandum 25. The new directive sets short clocks, names commercial vendors as core infrastructure, and arms the government with the authority to cancel contracts with companies that try to restrict how their models are used.

The deadlines are tight. Within 90 days, the Secretary of War must issue an updated version of Department of Defense Directive 3000.09, the 2012 policy on autonomy in weapon systems last revised in 2023. A classified annex runs on the same clock. Within 120 days, the Defense Department and the intelligence community must overhaul procurement to enable rapid onboarding of “advanced AI models from multiple vendors.”

The most contested clause is the one aimed at the vendors themselves. NSPM-11 instructs agencies to terminate, “to the maximum extent permissible by law,” contracts with firms that have “repeatedly demonstrated a pattern of conduct” limiting government use. It also bars any entity from a posture under which it “can disable, degrade, or modify an AI system that American warfighters depend on without prior approval.” Waivers exist, but they’re capped at one year and must be reported up to senior White House staff.

The framing operation around all this is doing real work. The White House fact sheet accuses the prior order of having “burdened American AI adoption with ideological mandates and fostered dangerous single-vendor dependencies.” The Benton Institute notes that NSPM-11’s actual text doesn’t characterize NSM-25 at all; it just rescinds it. The press release is louder than the document.

Michael C. Horowitz, writing for the Council on Foreign Relations, reads the substance as “more continuity than change,” noting that the accountability chain running from president through commanders to warfighter is “consistent with the Biden memo that NSPM-11 replaces.” He argues the termination provision is “largely considered a response to the Pentagon’s legal battle with AI firm Anthropic,” and warns about what happens to the U.S. military “if it is deprived of the talent and technology of one of the world’s leading AI companies.”

The backdrop, per Nextgov, is the recent release of OpenAI’s GPT-5.5-Cyber, whose offensive and defensive capabilities heightened Washington’s appetite for speed. The pattern echoes the post-Sputnik procurement panics of the late 1950s: capability shock followed by an executive order that rewrites the contracting rules before the lawyers catch up. The vendors are now load-bearing national-security infrastructure, and the government has just written down, on paper, that it intends to act like it.

Sources