OpenAI has reached a deal to deploy its artificial intelligence models in classified environments for the Pentagon, following a breakdown in negotiations between the Pentagon and rival Anthropic.
The agreement allows OpenAI to provide AI services to the Department of Defense while maintaining specific safety prohibitions. The company aims to de-escalate tensions between the Department of Defense and the AI industry. “If we are right and this does lead to a de-escalation between the DoW and the industry, we will look like geniuses, and a company that took on a lot of pain to do things to help the industry,” Altman stated.
President Donald Trump directed federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s technology after a six-month transition period, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth designated the company as a supply-chain risk. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted the deal was rushed and resulted in significant backlash, contributing to Anthropic’s Claude overtaking OpenAI’s ChatGPT in Apple’s App Store on Saturday.
OpenAI’s blog post outlined three prohibited use cases for its models: mass domestic surveillance, autonomous weapon systems, and high-stakes automated decisions such as “social credit” systems. The company stated it retains full discretion over its safety stack and deployment via cloud API. “We don’t know why Anthropic could not reach this deal, and we hope that they and more labs will consider it,” the blog post added.
Anthropic stated it had red lines against the use of its technology in fully autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance. Sam Altman stated OpenAI had the same red lines as Anthropic. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick claimed the deal allows for domestic surveillance because it references compliance with Executive Order 12333.
OpenAI’s head of national security partnerships, Katrina Mulligan, argued that deployment architecture prevents integration into weapons systems or sensors. “By limiting our deployment to cloud API, we can ensure that our models cannot be integrated directly into weapons systems, sensors, or other operational hardware,” Mulligan said.
