OpenAI has abruptly reached an agreement with the Department of War, after rival Anthropic stood its ground and refused to give in to the Pentagon’s demands.
CEO Sam Altman announces the deal on X, just hours after the agency’s deadline for Anthropic expired.
“Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network.
In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome.
AI safety and the wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.”
According to Altman, OpenAI will build technical safeguards to get the models to behave as expected.
“We will deploy FDEs (forward deployed engineers) to help with our models and to ensure their safety. We will deploy on cloud networks only. We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion, we think everyone should be willing to accept.”
The news comes after President Trump moved to ban Anthropic for government use after the AI startup raised concerns about the potential use of its AI model Claude for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
In a Squawk Pod interview, Altman himself expressed support for Dario Amodei and Anthropic for not succumbing to government pressure.
“I think Anthropic and others have said they understand that as well. I don’t personally think the Pentagon should be threatening DPA (Defense Production Act) against these companies… I’ve been, for all the differences I have with Anthropic, I mostly trust them as a company, and I think they really do care about safety, and I’ve been happy that they’ve been supporting our warfighters.”
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