ND.BUILDS // NOTES
· By Frank Milz
Cloud exclusivity ends, and defense AI buyers gain options
Microsoft and OpenAI's late April reset let frontier models spread across clouds, including paths defense contractors already use.
At the end of April, Microsoft and OpenAI reworked exclusivity so OpenAI could serve more workloads across clouds, including AWS. For commercial builders that was a pricing story. For defense and dual-use vendors it was an architecture story.
## Why it matters Mission systems hate single-cloud dead ends. Once frontier models can move, integrators can match classification, region, and cost without rewriting the whole stack.
## Action Revisit assumptions that Azure was the only serious door to a given model family. Document which agent workloads are portable today. Ask for stateful runtime clarity, because memory and tool brokers are where lock-in hides after the API call gets commoditized.